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THE MORAL CRUSADER 

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 



a :fiSioarapbical iSssa^ 



FOUNDED ON 



THE STORY OF GARRISON'S LIFE TOLD 
BY HIS CHILDREN" 




GOLD WlJSr SMITH, D.C.L. 



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FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY "^ 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

1892 
Printed in the United States 






Copyright, 1893, by the 
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 



[Registered at Stationers^ Hall, London, England] 




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THE MORAL CRUSADER, W. L. GARRISON. 



INTEODUCTIO:^. 



There is sometimes a crisis in the history of a 
nation when a man is urgently needed to prick the 
national conscience on a moral question. The man 
need not be supremely wise after the fashion of 
earthly wisdom, nor supremely strong after the 
fashion of earthly strength. But he must be him- 
self an impersonation of conscience. He must be 
perfectly pure and disinterested, free not only from 
ambition and cupidity, but from vanity, from mere 
love of excitement, from self-seeking of every kind, 
as well as brave, energetic, persevering, and endowed 
with a voice which can make itself heard. Such a 
crisis was the ascendency of the Slave Power in the 
United States, and such a man was William Lloyd 
Garrison. His character is interesting in its weak- 
ness as in its strength, and the contemplation of it 
is cheering, as it shows what a fund of moral force 
a society sound at the core always possesses, dark 

as may be the apparent outlook, and how that force 

(3) 



may be called forth, perhaps from the most uiisiis- 
l)ected quarter, in the hour of need. 

Garrison's life has been told by his children with 
a loving care and minuteness which make the four 
portly volumes through which it extends a model 
of biographical industry. In those volumes are 
comjDrised the archives of the moral as distinguished 
from the political movement against slavery. They 
claim a place in all libraries of American history, 
but to libraries their bulk confines them. It fell to 
the lot of the i)resent writer to notice them in two 
numbers of Macmilluu's Magazine, and the inter- 
est which he was led to feel in the subject, combined 
with the reminiscences awakened in his own mind 
by their narrative, induced him to compile this little 
volume. More than a compilation the volume can 
hardly pretend to be, since for its material it is 
almost entirely beholden to the larger work, so far 
as the facts are concerned. The opinions, of course, 
are the author's own and formed from his own point 
of view, which is that of an Anglo-Canadian who 
sympathized with the American friends of the Anti- 
Slavery cause. The authors of the larger work 
have so far extended their confidence to the present 
writer as to sanction his use of the materials col- 
lected by them : they are in no way responsible for 
his opinions. In forming his estimate of the char- 
acter with which he had to deal he has had the ad- 

(4) 



vantage, on one side, of the memoir on "CTarrison 
and His Times," written by Mr. Oliver Johnson, one 
of the foremost, ablest, and stanchest of Garrison's 
comrades in the great contest, and, on the other, of 
the "Life of James G. Birney," written by Mr. 
William Birney, also a most competent exponent of 
his own side of the case. He has, of course, availed 
himself of the general authorities for the history of 
the time. 

To the military heroism of the struggle against 
the Slave Power, literary monuments, as well as 
monuments of marble, numerous and splendid, are 
being raised. Let the moral heroism also have its 
due. The interest of its history, if less thrilling, is 
not less deep. 

In dealing with the story of Garrison's life,* an 
Anglo-Canadian writer is not encroaching on Ameri- 
can ground. Garrison was recognized as a fellow - 
laborer with Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Buxton. 
He belongs not only to the United States, but to 
England, as the great emancipating nation, and to 
Canada, as the asylum of the slave. 

* William Lloyd Garrison [1805-18791 = The Story of His Life 
Told by His Children. Vols. I. -IV., 8vo. New York : The Cen- 
tury Co., 1885-89. 

(5) 



I. 



William Lloyd Garrison was born on the 10th 
of December, l>!<»o, in the thriving mercantile town 
of Newbiiryport, Massachusetts. His father, Abijah 
Garrison, and his mother, Fanny, whose maiden 
name was Lloyd, had migrated to New England, 
as many then did and many have done since, from 
the British colony of New Brunswick. Strange and 
sad to say, three years afterward Abijah Garrison, 
who was a seafaring man, forever deserted his wife 
and children. He returned to New Brunswick and 
is believed to have wandered on before his death to 
Canada. He is said to have loved his wife and 
children, and his reason for deserting them is a 
mystery. But it is supposed to have been in some"^- 
way connected with drink, the bane of society and 
of seafaring men above all others in those days. , 
Mrs. Garrison, who was an excellent woman, cheer- 
fully took up as a mother her lonely burden and 
went out as a monthly nurse. She was not without 
humble friends who were good to her in the evil 
days. Lloyd learned to read and write at the pri- 
mary school and was afterward for three months at 

(7) 



a grammar school, but this he was obliged to leave 
that he might earn his bread by helping his mother's 
friend, Deacon Bartlett, to saw wood, sharpen saws, 
and peddle apples. This work he did not like, and 
he ran away from the deacon's service, but was 
brought back with the young companion of his es- 
capade by the driver of the mail-coach. We are 
told that he was a thorough boy in fondness for 
games and sports, trundled his hoop barefooted all 
over Newburyport, swam the Merrimac in summer 
and skated on it in winter, was good at sculling a 
boat, was expert at marbles, played at bat and ball 
and snowball, and sometimes led the South-end boys 
in their battles with the North-enders. He swam 
three-quarters of a mile across the river and swam 
back again against the tide, and in winter once 
nearly lost his life by breaking through the ice. He 
caught a seaport boy's fancy for going to sea, but 
the infection took little hold, and he was afterward 
thoroughly cured of it by sea-sickness. Like his 
mother, he was fond of music, had a rich voice, and 
joined the choir of the Baptist church. There was 
no sign of anything eccentric about him as a boy, 
unless it were his restlessness in the service of Dea- 
con Bartlett. His fondness for pet animals showed 
a tender disposition. It is evident from his corre- 
spondence with his mother that he was a loving and 

dutiful son. In after-years he said that he felt like 

"^ (8) 



a little boy when he thought of his mother, and 
always spoke of her memory with passionate affec- 
tion. 

The mother's health and strength were beginning 
to fail. It was necessary that Lloyd should earn 
his bread, and he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. 
He was only nine years old, and so small that he 
seemed hardly bigger than a last. The work was 
too heavy for him, and he always remembered with 
horror the heavy lapstone and his fingers sore with 
sewing, though he also remembered the goodness 
of his Quaker master, Oliver, and his wife. 

In 1815 Mr. Paul Newhall, a shoe manufacturer 
of Lynn, removing with his staff of workmen to 
Baltimore, took Mrs. Garrison and her two boys 
with him. At Baltimore James, the elder boy, was 
apprenticed at shoemaking, while Lloyd ran errands. 
Mr. Newhall's factory failed, and Mrs. Garrison had 
to take to monthly nursing again. She was not 
only religious, but a missionary, evangelized the 
workmen and set up a prayer-meeting for women. 
She had need of such support as religion could give 
her, for, besides the failure of her health, troubles 
came upon her. Her eldest boy, James, ran away 
to sea, where his career was wretched and degraded. 
Its close forms a tragic but honorable episode in 
Lloyd Garrison's life. Lloyd, his mother says, is 
a fine boy, a church-goer, and likely to be a com- 

(9) 



plete Baptist. But he was unhappy at Baltimore 
and yearned for Newburyport. To Newhuryport 
his mother sent him for a year, hoping at the end 
of that time to find a place for him again at Balti- 
more. In this she failed, and she had to resign 
herself to his prolonged absence from her side, which 
she did in a pious and touching letter. 

Lloyd was apprenticed to Moses Short, a cabinet- 
maker at Haverhill, Massachusetts, who treated 
him with kindness, and whose trade he did not dis- 
like. But he still yearned for Newburyport, and ran 
away from his master. The master, however, being 
good-natured, and seeing his homesickness, freely 
let him go back to Newburyport and Deacon Bart- 
lett. Eepeated efforts were made to find a place 
for him, but in vain, till Mr. Ephraim W. Allen, 
proprietor of the Newburyport Herald^ wanting a 
boy to learn the printer's trade, took him as an ap- 
prentice. This was in 1818, when he was thirteen 
years old. His foot was now on the lowest step of 
the right ladder. He took to the work at once, be- 
came very skilful in handling type, and felt pleasure 
in it through life. Mr. Allen's house was near 
Deacon Bartlett's, and the boy was happy in his 
new home. Mr. Allen, writing to Mrs. Garrison, 
says he never had a better boy. This she repeats in 
a letter to Lloyd declining some Balsam of Quito, 
probably a quack medicine, which he had offered to 

(10) 



solid her, and saying that she wishes for nothings 
more than the Bahn of Gilead, which heals souls. 
Mrs. Garrison's life was near its close. Her letters 
henceforth chronicle the inroad^ of her malady. 
That she was leaving her children alone and unpro- 
vided for, was to her the sting of death. "Thank 
God," she wrote to Lloyd, "I am well taken care of , 
for hoth black and white are all attention to me, 
and I have everything done that is necessary. The 
ladies are all kind to me, and I have a colored "^' 
woman that w^aits on me, that is so kind no one can 
tell how kind she is, and although a slave to man, 
yet a free-born soul, by the grace of God. Her 
name is Henny, and should I never see you again, 
and you should ever come where she is, remember 
her for your poor mother's sake." She contrasts 
the bright morning of her life with its sad close, 
and turns from the deceptive dreams of earthly hap- 
piness to what she deems the happy realities of re- 
ligion. She was too poor to send Lloyd as many 
letters as he w^ould have wished, the postage being 
twenty-five cents. But she managed in her inter- 
vals of convalescence to get together for him a trunk - 
ful of clothes, which she sent him as the last token 
of her love. Before her death, in 1823, he went to 
Baltimore and saw her once more. 

Lloyd was getting on well with his trade, and 
became so expert that he was made foreman of the 

(11) 



office. As a compositor, his rapidity and accuracy 
were first-rate. Among the journeymen in his office 
was Tobias Miller, afterward a clergyman and city 
missionary, lovable in character, sensible and racy 
in speech, from working by whose side he believed 
himself to have gained much. Not that Tobias 
Miller's wisdom seems to have been recondite. 
"Patience and perseverance!" " 'Tisn't as bad as 
it would be if it were worse!" "Never mind! 
'Twill be all the same a thousand years hence" — 
were the utterances of his philosophy when a des- 
perate proof came for correction at midnight or a 
form was "pied." Garrison, however, found com- 
fort in them amid the trials of his after-years. 
Probably it was the image of Mr. Miller's placid 
resignation, enhanced by the sensitiveness of his 
temperament, rather than his maxims, that con- 
soled. 

A young printer was pretty sure to take to writ- 
ing if he had any gifts and tendencies that way. 
Garrison had a strong taste for poetry and romance, 
while for poetry he seems to have had himself no 
mean gift had his stormy life permitted the regular 
cultivation of it. His favorite poets were Byron, 
Moore, Pope, Campbell, and Scott, and the imma- 
turity of his taste might excuse him if he loved Mrs. 
Hemans above them all. He took a healthy delight 
in the Waverley Novels. An American in a vortex 

(12) 



of party politics could not fail to be a politician. 
Garrison in his teens was an ardent Federalist and 
wielded his chivalrous pen in defence of the heroes 
of that party when fortune had left it stranded. 
But his first literary essay was a communication to 
the Herald, signed "An Old Bachelor," on a verdict 
in a bre.ach of promise case which had excited his 
indignation. The paper would not be received with 
applause by a Woman's Eights Association, nor 
would it have chimed in happily with Garrison's 
own writings and speeches in after-days when he 
was pleading for the admission of women to the 
platform of the Anti-Slavery Association. " Wom- 
en," he said, "in this country are too much idol- 
ized and flattered; therefore they are puffed up and 
inflated with pride and self-conceit. They make 
the men crawl, beseech, and supplicate, wait ui^n 
and do every manual service for them to gain their 
favor and approbation: they (the men) are, in fact, 
completely subservient to every whim and caprice 
of these changeable mortals. " " Women generally 
feel their importance," he continued, "and they use 
it without mercy." This communication was ac- 
cepted, and so were others, including an account of 
a shipwreck— fabricated, we are told, by the fancy 
of one glaringly ignorant of the sea. The editor 
paid his gifted correspondent the compliment of 
desiring an interview, but Garrison kept his secret 

(i;]) 



from all but his mother, who received the confidence 
with mingled pride and misgiving. In a subsequent 
letter she warns him of the garret, which is the com- 
mon lot of authors, and thinks that he would have 
been better employed if, instead of writing political 
pieces, he had been searching the Scriptures for the 
truth. 

Garrison wrote two articles on South American 
affairs, in which, touching on the outrages commit- 
ted by the young republics on vessels belonging to 
the United States after the sympathy shown their 
cause by that power, the future apostle of moral 
force and denouncer of all war recommends finish- 
ing the controversy with cannon, while the destined 
leader of the crusade against slavery glorifies with- 
out reserve American freedom, and shares the 
columns of the Herald with Caleb Gushing, who 
maintained that slave-owning was not at variance 
with republicanism because the sight of men de- 
prived of freedom made others prize it more. On 
the other hand, he had discernment enough to de- 
preciate the election of Jackson. Like an orthodox 
republican, he denounced the Holy Alliance and 
declaimed upon the wrongs of Poland. He also 
duly caught the Greek fever, and thought of going 
to fight for Greece. His writing was mature and, 
for the purposes of a journalist, good. At twenty 
he seemed cut out for success as an editor. He was 

(14) 



g*K)d- looking and well dressed. His portrait pre- 
sents him with a smooth face, abundance of black 
hair, and a ruffled shirt. He was a favorite with 
the ladies. He was healthy, social, mercurial, am- 
bitious, filled with hope by the acceptance of his 
writing. Nobody would have seen on his head a 
social crown of thorns. He had an excellent con- 
stitution, and was able to say toward the close of 
life that, though he had lived on all kinds of food, 
he had never known that he had a stomach ; so that 
the reformer in his case was not the dyspeptic. To 
add to his chances of success in a respectable career 
he was, as his mother had foretold, a "complete 
Baptist," a strict church-goer, a stanch supporter 
of the clergy, and an uncritical believer in the Bible. 
The twenty-first year of his age (1826) in fact 
saw him editor and proprietor of a paper. The 
Herald passed under a changed name from tke 
hands of Mr. Allen into those of Isaac Knapp, and 
from his into those of Garrison, who rechristened 
it the Free Press, Mr. Allen showing his confidence 
in his apprentice by advancing money. The motto 
of the Free Press, "Our Country, Our Whole 
Country, and Nothing but Our Country," gives 
little indication of a future career of disloyalty to 
the Union and loyalty to Humanity. The journal 
also copied without comment the words of the 
ineffable Edward Everett, once a Massachusetts 

( I-'') ) 



clergyman, who had not only quoted the jS^ew Tes- 
tament in support of slavery, but declared that 
there was no cause in which he would sooner buckle 
a knapsack on his back and put a musket to his 
shoulder than the suppression of a slave insurrec- 
tion at the South. The Free Press did indeed speak 
of slavery as a curse, and a theme to dwell upon till 
the country was rid of it; but this was a passing 
remark, and there was nothing to show that the edi- 
tor's thoughts were turned in that particular direc- 
tion. The Free Press had the good luck to bring 
out as a poet Whittier, then a Quaker lad working 
as a shoemaker with hammer and lapstone at East 
Haverhill. Little did the editor dream that he was 
opening the gate of fame to the poetic champion of 
wdiat was to be his own great cause. The paper 
seems to have done fairly well, but it lost party 
subscribers by taking an independent line, and Gar- 
rison, probably seeing that no more was likely to be 
made of it, sold it to Mr. John H. Harris, who at 
once put it on the opposite tack. 

Descending again from the dignity of editorship 
to the level of the journeyman printer, Garrison 
went to Boston in quest of employment. He was 
some time in finding it. Meanwhile he gratified 
his taste for politics by attending a caucus, and 
proposing a candidate in opposition to the nomina- 
tion of the leaders. He broke down in his si^eech 

(16) 



and was obliged to have recourse to the manu- 
scrii3t ill his hat. There ensued a newspaper 
tournament, in which, being rebuked for his pre- 
sumption, he defended himself with force and 
sprightliness against a sneer at his youth. 

" I leave it," he said, " to metaphysicians to deter- 
mine the precise moment when wisdom and ex- 
perience leap into existence — when for the first time 
the mind distinguishes truth from error, selfishness 
from patriotism, and passion from reason. It is 
sufficient for me that I am understood." In the 
end he formed a connection with Mr. Collier, a Bap- 
tist city missionary, the founder of the first temper- 
ance journal. Of that journal, of which the name 
was the National Philanthropist^ and the pro- 
claimed object "the sui)pression of intemperance 
and its kindred vices," Garrison was made editor. 
In those days drinking was terribly rife, and after 
the part it had played in Garrison's family misfort- 
unes, his heart in fighting against it would be with 
his pen. Other reforms, such as the better keeping 
of the Sabbath, were combined with temperance. 
The Philanthropist, if we may believe its editor, 
was successful in improving public sentiment and 
giving birth to reforming effort, but it was never 
self-supporting. It was not likely that a paper 
avowedly set up to plead a particular cause, would 
interest the world in general enough to make it a 

(17) 



commercial success. Indeed, even for the advocacy 
of a particular cause, it is better first to build your 
pulpit, and then to preach from it. When a journal 
has obtained a hold, by its general merits, on a 
large circle of readers, it may press its views on any 
special question with effect. In the second number 
of his paper Garrison had commented on the bill 
passed by the House of Assembly of South Carolina, 
to forbid the teaching of blacks to read and write. 
"There is," he said, "something unspeakably piti- 
able and alarming in the state of that society where 
it is deemed necessary for self-preservation to seal 
up the mind and the intellect of man to brutal in- 
capacity. We shall not now consider the policy of 
this resolve, but it illustrates the terrors of slavery 
in a manner as eloquent and affecting as imagina- 
tion can conceive. . . . Truly the alternatives of 
oppression are terrible. But this state of things 
cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us 
from destruction." These words, written in 1828, 
ring up the curtain of a new scene in the drama of 
Garrison's life. They heralded the arrival of Ben- 
jamin Lundy at Boston. There was a happy con- 
junction of two bright though small stars in the 

firmament of humanity. 

(18) 



n. 



Garrison had his precursors. Elihu Embree, 
the Quaker publisher of the first journal devoted to 
the abolition of slavery, was one of them. But the 
chief was Benjamin Lundy, also a Quaker, and a 
true and admirable though most humble servant of 
humanity. Lundy having lived at Wheeling, Vir- 
ginia, had seen the coffles of negroes in chains go 
by on their way to the South. He was a saddler, 
prosperous in his trade, and made what for him was 
wealth, but gave it all up to his cause. He fought 
with the jDen in different journals against the at- 
tempt to force Missouri into the Union as a Slave 
State. Then he set up at Mount Pleasant, in Ohio, 
a journal of his own called the Genius of Universal 
Emancipation. It was brought out without a dol- 
lar of capital and with only six subscribers, and for 
a time he walked a distance of twenty miles each 
month to Steubenville to get the journal printed, 
and returned with the edition on his back. He 
afterward moved with his journal to Tennessee, 
and at last to Baltimore, whither he trudged with 
his knapsack on his back, passing through south- 

(10) 



western Virginia and North Carolina, and sowing 
the seeds of his doctrine by lecturing as he went. He 
would seem to have been able to carry gunpowder 
in a furnace ; but he was very gentle ; his doctrine 
was gradual emancipation, and his policy was colo- 
nization, which was accepted at the South. In the 
interest of that policy he visited Hayti. He was 
feeble in frame, somewhat deaf, and a bad lecturer, 
having a weak voice, so that his efforts must have 
been painful, and his motive cannot have been the 
love of platform excitement or of self -display. At 
Baltimore he continued to publish the Genius of 
Universal Emancipatiou, going about to lecture 
and form associations at the same time. Baltimore 
was a port of the domestic slave trade, with a tur- 
bulent and violent mob. Lundy's mildness did not 
save him from a brutal assault by a slave-trading 
ruffian. It was after this that he came to Boston, 
made the acquaintance of Garrison, and, by plead- 
ing the cause to him, fired a heart which was ready 
enough to catch the flame. It appears that Garri- 
son's heart was fired all the more easily from seeing 
the coldness of the clergymen to whom Lundy ap- 
pealed in vain, for he cries out upon "the moral 
cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbe- 
lief, the cruel scepticism, that were revealed on that 
memorable occasion." Everybody in the room was 
against slavery, but, then, the formation of a soci- 

(20) 



ety at Boston would enrage and alarm the South. 
"Perhaps a select committee might he formed under 
an inoffensive name." Lundy, however, was en- 
couraged enough to revisit Boston, where (August 
7, 1828) he held a meeting in the vestry of a 
Baptist church, at which he discredited deportation 
as a remedy, pointing out that the increase in the 
numher of blacks at the South in a year was greater 
than the Colonization Society could handle in half 
a century. The meeting was brought to an abrupt 
termination by the pastor of the church, who rose 
and personally denounced the agitation against 
slavery as offensive to the South and dangerous, 
affirming that the States were gradually getting 
rid of slavery by selling their slaves to those fur- 
ther south. A committee of twenty, however, was 
formed, and Garrison was one. 

In the great Presidential campaign of 1828 Gar- 
rison, having made his mark as a writer, was 
invited by a committee of prominent citizens at 
Bennington, Vermont, to come and edit a new 
paper there in advocacy of the re-election of John 
Quincy Adams against Andrew Jackson. The 
Journal of the Times was the name of the jDaper. 
Its motto was Garrison's favorite quotation from 
Cicero, "Eeason shall prevail with us more than 
Popular Opinion." Though set up for a political 
camj)aign, the Journal of the Times declared itself 

(21) 



independent of party. Independent of everything 
but public morality and constitutional government it 
might be in opposing the dictatorship of Jackson. 
But it further declared that its editor had three 
objects in view, which he would pursue through 
life — the suppression of intemperance and its asso- 
ciate vices, the gradual emancipation of every slave 
in the Republic, and a perpetuity of national peace. 
It will be noted that gradual emancipation was still 
the mark and limit of his aims. He also avowed 
himself a friend, even the enthusiast, of what he 
styled the American system of fostering the growth 
of native industry by a protective tariff. The crea- 
tion of national centres of industry seemed to him 
to be proved by daily experience to be the best mode 
of promoting the welfare of the people, and the 
great secret of national aggrandizement. It may 
safely be said that he had not studied the question 
deeply in any of its aspects. If he had, he might 
have doubted whether by breaking up the commer- 
cial union of nations he would be hastening the 
advent of the kingdom of peace, which was one of 
his three aspirations, and even whether the shack- 
ling of industry which the protective system entails 
was consistent with universal emancipation. We 
shall see a notable change in his sentiments on this 
subject hereafter. 

From its first number the Journal of the Times 

(32) 



showed the effect of its editor's intercourse with 
Liindy by the clearness and vehemence of its utter- 
ances on the subject of slavery, though what Gar- 
rison's biographers call the scales of Colonization 
had not yet fallen from the editor's eyes. "For 
ourselves," it said, "we are resolved to agitate this 
subject to the utmost ; nothing but death shall pre- 
vent us from denouncing a crime which has no 
parallel in human depravity; we shall take high 
ground." With literal truth it could aver that the 
manacled slave was driven to market past the door 
of the Capitol, in which sat the representatives of 
that morning star of freedom, the American Re- 
public. Over slavery in the District of Columbia 
Congress had power ; this was accordingly the point 
in the enemy's lines most open to attack. Garrison 
had the honor of transmitting to Congress a petition 
got up by himself and signed by 2,352 citizens of 
Vermont, in favor of the abolition of slavery in the 
District. The petition was referred to a committee, 
the report of which embodied the politicians' view 
of the subject. Agitation, the committee held, 
would tend to create insubordination and restless- 
ness among the slaves, "who would otherwise be 
comparatively happy and contented. " Emancipation 
in the District would spread disturbance through 
the Slave States. It would deprive the inhabitants 

of property which they had enjoyed under the laws 

(23) 



of Virginia and Maryland. As to the traffic, it was 
doing good Ly gradually carrying the negroes 
further South, "and although violence might some- 
times be done to their feelings in the separation of 
families, yet it should be some consolation to those 
whose feelings were interested in their behalf to 
know that their condition was more frequently bet- 
tered and their minds made happier by the ex- 
change!'' Garrison branded the report as "the 
worst apology for the most relentless tyranny." It 
was a pity that George III. and Grenville, still more, 
that Burke, had not lived to read it. One month 
later, Andrew Jackson, entering Washington by 
storm, with violence and the spoils system in his 
train, put Congress, liberty, and everything that 
could tend to emancipation under his feet. Slave- 
hunting on Northern soil under the Fugitive Slave 
Law went on merrily. When the country was 
convulsed by the anti-Masonic excitement conse- 
quent on the disappearance of Morgan, Garrison 
drew a telling contrast between the commotion 
caused by the abduction of one man and the total 
absence of any feeling for the two millions who 
were groaning out their lives in bondage. He was 
happy at Bennington, felt his powers, liked the Ver- 
m outers, and found their climate the best in the 
world. 

At Bennington, however, he did not long remain. 
(24) 



Lundy, who had been watching his course, seeing 
that he had now thoroughly given himself to the 
cause, resolved to invite him to Baltimore, and 
walked from Baltimore to Bennington for the pur- 
pose. He proposed that the Genius of Universal 
Emancipation should be changed from a monthly 
to a weekly paper, and that the younger partner 
should edit it, while the elder travelled to get sub- 
scriptions. Garrison accepted the invitation and 
published his valedictory as editor of the Journal 
of the Times, announcing his devotion of himself 
to the anti-slavery cause, and proclaiming once 
more that "Reason had prevailed with him more 
than Popular Opinion." The rival editor exulted in 
his departure, and published a letter describing 
him as an egotistical dandy, with a pair of silver- 
mounted spectacles riding elegantly across his nose 
and displaying " the pert loquacity of a blue- jay. " 
Such did he look when seen from a hostile point of 
view. The enemy, however, was constrained to 
admit Garrison's talents, integrity, and patriotism. 
After leaving Bennington (1829) Garrison stayed 
a while at Boston waiting for the return of Lundy, 
who had gone with twelve emancipated slaves to 
Hayti, where surely he can have seen little to cheer 
him. Meantime Garrison was invited to address 
the Congregational Societies of Boston on the Fourth 
of July. It seems that Boston conservatism was 

(25) 



already on the alert, for Garrison was subjected to 
the annoyance of being sued for $1 fine hy the clerk 
of a militia company for failure of appearance at 
muster, and was obliged to betray the barrenness of 
moral journalism as a trade by Iwrrowing the petty 
sum of a friend. The theme of his address, "Dan- 
gers to the Nation," was likely to awaken the sus- 
picions of the enemy. He said that his knees 
knocked together at the thought of sj^eaking before 
such a concourse. But he had made up his mind 
that the address should be severe and sombre. Se- 
vere and sombre it was. In opposition to the vulgar 
Fourth of July patriotism, "covering only its native 
territory, blustering only for its own rights, spurn- 
ing moral restraint, and tyrannizing where it could 
with impunity," he took his stand on the patriotism 
which is larger than a continent. Of slavery and of 
the duty of getting rid of it he spoke in the boldest 
strain. It ought, he said, to make the Fourth of 
July a day not of boisterous merriment and idle 
pageantry, but of fasting and prayer ; not of joy, 
but of lamentation. It ought to spike every cannon, 
to haul down every banner, to clothe the people in 
sackcloth, to bow down their heads in the dust. 

Pitiful was the list of grievances which the Dec- 
laration of Independence, read on that day, set 
forth against British tyranny, compared with the 
grievances of the American slave. The orator was 

(26) 



sick, he said, of unmeaning declamation in praise 
of liberty and equality, of hypocritical cant about 
the inalienable rights of man. He could never stand 
before an assembly of Europeans denouncing kingly 
government and boasting of his American citizen- 
ship, for, if he did, the recollection of his country's 
barbarity would blister his lips and make his cheeks 
burn with shame. To freeze the blood of the au- 
dience by depicting the cruelties of slavery was 
needless ; the one thing needful was to point out the 
path of duty. There were four things, the orator 
averred, which could not be gainsaid : the claim of 
the slaves to sympathy and redress ; the responsibil- 
ity of the Free States for the existence of slavery 
under the national compact, and their consequent 
right of remonstrance and abatement ; that no jus- 
tification of slavery could be found in the condition 
of its victims; that the blacks were capable of being- 
raised by freedom and education to the level of the 
whites. To expect to succeed without collision or 
without a struggle with the worst passions was 
hopeless ; but the orator was sanguine enough to be- 
lieve that these could be easily conquered by meek- 
ness, perseverance, and prayer. Toward the close, 
however, the address somewhat halts, as its author 
would himself have said at an after-day. It admits 
the danger of liberating all at once the present 
race of blacks. This, it says, is out of the question ; 

(27) 



the fabric must be reduced brick by brick till it is 
brought so low that it may be overturned without 
burying the nation in its ruins. Then the orator 
rises again to an apocalyptic pitch of denunciation, 
predicting, as the penalty of jjersistence in national 
sin, horrors worse than those of St. Domingo. 

The Boston American Traveller had a notice of 
the discourse, describing the orator as quite a youth 
in appearance, dressed in black, with a bare neck, 
and a broad linen collar spread out over that of his 
coat. His utterance at first was feeble, but he be- 
came impressive as he went on. He was, of course, 
accused of slandering his country and blaspheming 
the Declaration of Independence. 

Garrison's Fourth of July address set his own 
mind actively at work, and after a few weeks of 
reflection he decisively arrived at the momentous 
conclusion which shaped his whole subsequent 
course, that immediate emancipation, instead of 
being a dream, was the only solid ground upon 
which the moral and religious reformer could take 
his stand. If slavery was not merely a social, 
political, and economical error, but a wrong and a 
sin, persistence in holding a man as property even 
for a day must be wrongful and sinful. If the 
slave had a right to his freedom, he had a right to 
it that very hour. Emancipation immediate and 
unconditional was henceforth the lodestar of Garri- 

(28) 



son's life. Wendell Phillips is rapt with admiration 
of this boy, who saw what sages did not see, that 
morality alone would compel sulnnission, and that 
the right policy was the absolute and unqualified 
avowal of the uttermost truth. It is needless to 
say that the unqualified avowal of the absolute and 
the uttermost was the thing congenial to Wendell 
Phillips' own soul. Certain it is that while others 
made up issues of different kinds, constitutional, 
social, and economical, the moral issue was made up 
by Calhoun, who maintained that slavery was en- 
tirely right, and Garrison, who maintained that it 

was utterly and intolerablv wrong. 

(29) 



in. 



The doctrine of immediate and unconditional 
emancipation had been already embraced by Garri- 
son when, Lundy having returned from Ha3'ti, the 
two men met at Baltimore to settle their partner- 
ship in the Genius of Universal Emancij^ation. 
But Lundy, always mild, was not prej^ared to em- 
brace it. How, then, was their partnership to be 
arranged? Lundy proposed that each put his in- 
itials to his own articles, and that neither should 
be responsible for what the other said. This pro- 
posal was accepted, and the Genius of Universal 
Emancijyation had two voices. But one of the two 
was far the stronger. Lundy, in his salutatory, 
merely explained the arrangements. Garrison, in 
his, proclaimed his sole reliance on the eternal prin- 
ciples of justice for the solution of the slavery ques- 
tion, and declared that they pointed to immediate 
and complete emancijDation. This bugle note, 
sounded loud and clear from the first, could not fail 
to set the echoes flying in a centre of the traffic like 
Baltimore, where slave auctions and the shipment 

of slaves were constantly going on ; and every week 

(30) 



the Genius had a column of slavery cruelties and 
horrors, to which Baltimore itself contributed its 
quota. In the first month of their partnership, the 
two reformers received a visit one Sunday from a 
slave who had just been whipped with a cowhide, 
and on whose bleeding back they counted twenty- 
seven terrible gashes, while his head was much 
bruised. His only fault was that he had not loaded 
a wagon to suit the overseer. He was at the time 
on the point of receiving his freedom. Expostula- 
tion was met with contempt and abuse. A few days 
later, Garrison heard in a house which he passed 
the sound of the whip and cries of anguish, and 
this, he notes, was nothing uncommon. 

His first encounter was with the brutal slave- 
trader who had assaulted Lundy. The man's 
advertisements were refused on account of liis no- 
torious cruelty, even b}' journals which published 
advertisements of other slave auctions. Garrison 
exposed him in a scathing article. The man ascribed 
the article to Lundy and threatened vengeance. 
Garrison at once avowed the authorship, and chal- 
lenged the formidable ruffian to meet him at his 
boarding-house and discuss the question. Here was 
no want of courage. The taunt afterward freely 
flung on Garrison and his comrades, of keeping in 
the safe North and fearing to present their doctrines 
in the stronghold of slavery, was practically refuted 

(31) 



in advance. Garrison's second and more serious 
encounter was with Mr. Todd, a merchant of New- 
bury port, Garrison's own town, who had allowed 
his ship to he freighted with slaves at Baltimore. 
The transjiortation of slaves from one State to an- 
other was going on at the rate of fifty thousand a 
year. The foreign slave-trade was now piracy; 
why was the domestic slave-trade to he held blame- 
less? Todd's crime was doubled by his Puritan 
respectability. He was denounced in a flaming 
editorial. Thereupon he brought an action for libel. 
On the trial it appeared that the defendant had 
gone, as writers of flaming editorials are apt to go, 
somewhat beyond the strict facts. He failed to 
prove what he had insinuated — that Todd was in the 
habit of carrying slaves, and owed a success over 
his rivals in trade, which otherwise was mysterious, 
to that unholy source. He failed to j^rove that the 
slaves were chained, though nothing was more 
likely than that they would be chained as the coffles 
sent by land usually were, while the advocate who 
could speak of them as " passengers " must have had 
a front of brass. On the other hand, the main facts 
could not be denied. The ship had been freighted 
with slaves, more, even, in number than Garrison 
had alleged, and this had been done with Todd's 
knowledge and approval. Garrison was defended 
with spirit. But at Baltimore justice in slavery 

(32) 



cases was not blind. Garrison was found guilty of 
libel, and was condemned to pay a fine of fifty dollars, 
together with fifty dollars costs, or go to jail. Not 
being able to pay the fine, to jail he went, and was 
saluted on his entrance with the customary jeers of 
the jail-birds. Stone walls, however, did not make 
a prison. The jailer was kind, and the captive was 
allowed to receive the visits of Lundy and of Isaac 
Knajjp, his old comrade of the printing-office, who 
had come to Baltimore to work on the Genius. He 
had the free range of the prison, was permitted to 
talk to all its inmates about their cases, and found 
it a good place for sketching "the lights and 
shadows of human nature." There were in the 
jail runaway slaves, whom it was the custom to 
sell South, and slave-traders came to buy them. 
With one of the traders, who seems to have been a 
mild specimen of his class. Garrison opened a dis- 
cussion by asking him rather brusquely what right 
he had to his slave. " My father left him to me," 
was the innocent reply. "Suppose, sir, your father 
had broken into a bank and left you the fruits of his 
robbery?" The trader fell back on the curse of 
Ham. Garrison replied that granting — what re- 
mained to be proved — that the Africans were the 
descendants of Ham, Noah's curse was a prediction 
of future servitude, not an injunction to oppress. 
With perhaps more force he added, "Pray, sir, is 

(33) 



it a careful desire to fulfil the Scriptures or to make 
money that induces you to hold your fellow -men 
in bondage?" The trader asked him how he would 
like to see a black man President of the United 
States. He replied adroitly, but honestly, that he 
was a loyal Republican, and should bow to the 
decision of the people. The last thrust was, " How 
should you like to have a black man marry your 
daughter?" This was parried with, "I am not 
married, I have no daughter;" and the thrust was 
returned with, "Sir, I am not familiar with your 
practices; but allow me to say that slave-holders 
generally should be the last persons to affect fastid- 
iousness on that point, for they seem to be enamoured 
with amalgamation." 

Part of his enforced leisure the prisoner employed 
in writing verses, some of which are such as to con- 
firm our belief that, had he taken that line, he 
would have won at least a fair measure of reputa- 
tion as a poet. 

THE GUILTLESS PRISONER. 

Prisoner ! within these gloomy walls close pent — 

Guiltless of Horrid crime or venial wrong — 
Bear nobly up against thy punishment, 

And in thy innocence be great and strong ! 
Perchance thy fault was iove to all mankind ; 

Thou didst oppose some vile, oppressive law ; 
Or strive all human fetters to unbind ; 

Or would "st not bear the implements of war •— 
(34) 



Wliat then? Dost thou so soon repent the deed? 

A martyr's crown is richer than a king's ! 
Think it an honor with thy Lord to bleed. 

And glory 'midst intensest sufferings ! 
Though beat — imprisoned — put to open shame — 
Time shall embalm and magnify thy name. 

Allen of the Herald, Whittier, and other friends 
were troubled about their friend's imprisonment, 
more perhaps than he was himself. To their letters 
of sympathy he responded by contrasting his own 
brief and comparatively mild captivity with the 
cruel and lifelong captivity of the slaves; and he 
asked, if the oppression of a single man excited so 
much emotion, how much greater ought to be the 
emotion excited by the far worse oppression of two 
millions? At last "Whittier wrote to Henry Clay, 
whom Garrison, not having yet lost faith and in- 
terest in politicians, had warmly supported for the 
Presidency. Clay was minded to pay the fine; 
but he was forestalled by Arthur Tappan, a wealthy 
and philanthrophic merchant of New York, who 
here comes on the scene as a leading friend and 
generous provider of the sinews of war to the anti- 
slavery cause. Tappan sent a hundred dollars, and 
Garrison, after a captivity of forty-nine days, was 
set free. His spirit had not for a moment quailed 
under imprisonment. He had been not only un- 
complaining, but jocund ; nor had he betrayed the 
vanity which a youthful crusader would be likely 

(35) 



to betray by boasting of his martyrdom. In him, 
beneath a gentle and rather feminine exterior, was 
a strong man. It is needless to say that his wrath 
turned more fiercely than ever against slave-owners : 
they were henceforth in his eyes kidnappers and 
man-stealers, whom it was the duty of every 
Christian church to expel from its communion. He 
was still a devout Christian and churchman, and to 
the action of the Christian churches, above all things, 
he still looked for countenance and support in the 
championship of a great moral cause. 

During Garrison's imprisonment his partner had 
been compelled to reduce their journal, which never 
had subscriptions enough to float it, from a weekly 
to a monthly, and the partnership came to an end. 
Garrison went back to his own State, and in 1830 
began lecturing for the cause. But he soon had a 
chilling experience in the quarter where he might 
have expected the warmest sympathy. Churches, 
both at Newbury port and Boston, were closed 
against him : if the pastor was willing to open the 
door, the trustees, mindful of financial interests, 
were not. At Boston it was left for a society of 
avowed infidels to give the Christian lecturer the 
use of a hall for a cause in which they had no par- 
ticular interest beyond their loyalty to freedom of 
opinion, and in support of which he appealed to the 
Gospel which they rejected. The head of orthodox 

(36) 



religion at Boston, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was present 
at the lecture, but gave no sign. Afterward he 
excused himself on the ground that he had too 
many irons in the fire, telling Garrison at the same 
time if he would give up his fanatical notions and 
be guided by the clergy, they would make him 
the Wilberforce of America. But there were also 
present Samuel J. May, a young Unitarian minis- 
ter from Connecticut, his cousin, Samuel E. Sewall, 
a Boston lawyer, and his brother-in-law, A. Bronson 
Alcott. Mr. May has recorded his imjDressions. 
"Never before," he says, "was I so affected by the 
speech of man. When he had ceased speaking I 
said to those around me: 'That is a providential 
man ; he is a prophet ; he will shake our nation to 
the centre, but he will shake slavery out of it. We 
ought to know him, we ought to help him. Come, 
let us go and give him our hands!'" They gave 
the lecturer their hands; Mr. Alcott invited him 
to his home, and there they all sat late into the 
night listening to him as he proved that immediate, 
unconditional emancipation, without exi3atriation, 
was the right of every slave and could not be with- 
held by his master an hour without sin. "That 
night," says Mr. May, "my soul was baptized in 
his spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and 
fellow -laborer of William Lloyd Garrison." Sewall 
also became a zealous disciple and very helpful. 

(37) 



(laiTison had made up his mind to set up another 
anti-slavery journal. His old friend and comrade, 
Isaac Knapj), was ready to join him in the venture. 
The question was whether the place of puhlica- 
tion should be Washington or Boston. Washington 
was the centre of government, but Boston was the 
centre of opinion, and assuredly it was not less in 
need of having the Gospel preached to it than any 
district in which slavery reigned. The revolution 
of sentiment to be effected was greater, as Garrison 
said, in the Free States, and particularly in New 
England, than in the South. He found in New Eng- 
land " contempt more bitter, opposition more active, 
detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, 
and apathy more frozen, than among slave-owners 
themselves." Frozen apathy, at all events, could 
not be the condition of the people at the South ; and 
if perchance any of them had hearts to be touched, 
they had that before their eyes and in their ears 
which would touch their hearts, while from the eye 
and ear of the North the bleeding back of the slave 
and his cry of agony were far away. Washington 
had held out no encouragement. Moreover, Lundy 
had already taken the Genius there, and a second 
anti-slavery sheet was not required. So it was at 
Boston, "within sight of Bunker Hill and in the 
birthplace of liberty," that the flag of Emancipation 
was raised. On that spot, every Fourth of July, 

(38) 



most loudly resounded the thunders of patriotic 
declamation against the memory of the British 
oppressor, whose tyranny had l)een felt hy the col- 
onists, not in whips and chains, but in a small duty 
on tea. On that spot still great meetings were held, 
and torrents of generous eloquence were poured 
forth, in the cause of the trampled Pole and the 
insurgent Greek. Nor was this the. mere Pharisa- 
ism of liberty; it was all perfectly genuine in its 

way. Our powers of self-deception are unbounded. 

(39) 



rv. 



On Saturday, January 1, 1831, the first number 
of the Liberator appeared. It was a weekly journal 
bearing the names of William Lloyd Garrison and 
Isaac Knapj) as publishers. Its motto was, "Our 
Country is the World, Our Countrymen are Man- 
kind," a direct challenge to those whose motto was 
the Jingo cry of those days, " Our Country, right 
or wrong!" It was a modest folio, with a page of 
four columns, measuring fourteen inches by nine 
and a quarter. Garrison, as we have said, was very 
skilful as a printer, and his journal, in neatness and 
accuracy, did justice to his skill. The paper had 
not a dollar of capital. It was printed at first with 
borrowed type. Garrison and Knapp did all the 
work of every kind between them. Garrison of course 
doing the editorials. That he w^rote them can 
iiardly be said : his habit was often to set up with- 
out manuscript. The office was at Merchants' 
Hall, burned down in the great fire of is 72, in the 
thirc story, under the eaves. Oliver Johnson, who 
was often there, has vividly described the dingy 
walls; the small windows bespattered with print- 

(40) 



er's ink; the press standing in one corner; the 
composing-stands opposite; the long editorial and 
mailing table covered with newspapers ; the bed of 
the editor and publisher on the floor. The publishers 
announced in their first issue their determination 
to go on as long as they had bread and water to 
live on. In fact, they lived on bread and milk, with 
a little fruit and a few cakes, which they bought in 
small shops below. Garrison apologizes for the 
meagreness of the editorials, which, he says, he 
has but six hours, and those at midnight, to 
compose, all the rest of his time and the whole 
of that of his companion being taken up by the 
mechanical work. He hoped soon to have a negro 
apprentice to help them. Let it be remembered 
that Garrison had in him, as a printer and a writer, 
the means of earning a sure and comfortable liveli- 
hood, and, as a writer, in a way gratifying to the 
ambition which his detractors paint as his ruling 
motive. Supposing even that his whole subsequent 
career was a series of errors, honor and gratitude 
would surely be due to him who, at twenty-six, with 
few friends and no resources but those of his own 
heart and brain, could thus sincerely devote himself 
to a life's battle with a gigantic power of evil. That 
his devotion was sincere, his perseverance for thirty- 
five years amid hardships and discouragements, of 
which penury was not the greatest, is the proof. 

(41) 



It was against nothing less than the world, or at 
least the world in which he lived, that this yonth of 
twenty-six, with his humble jmrtner, took up arms. 
Slavery was at the height of its power. It had been 
firmly installed in the Government by the complete 
victory of Jackson over Quincy Adams ; for Jackson, 
though opposed to Southern nullification and seces- 
sionism, was a stanch friend of slavery. Since the 
conflict which ended in the Missouri Compromise, the 
slave-owning South had become solid, and no candi- 
date for the all-coveted Presidency could hope to 
succeed if he was under its ban. Democrats and 
Whigs, therefore, alike bent their consciences to its 
dictation and courted its vote. Its fell influence 
was to be shown a few years hence by the miserable 
fall of Webster. It had passed the provisional and 
precarious stage of its existence, had put off its 
apologetic attitude, had proclaimed itself righteous 
and perpetual. Strong in its evil convictions, it 
wore a sort of moral majesty in comparison with 
the recreant North. Instead of the quiet demise 
which had once been its ostensible demand, it had 
begun to dream not only of endless life but of un- 
limited extension. The people idolized the Union 
which had been the source to them of wealth, se- 
curity, and greatness; and the threat of secession 
brandished over their heads by the slave-owner was 
enough, as in the sequel lamentably appeared, to 

(42) 



bring all with whom political considerations were 
supreme to his feet. The interest of commerce in 
slavery, since the invention of the cotton-gin and 
the development of the cotton trade, was immense, 
and was apparently liound up with the institution, 
it being assumed on all hands that without negro 
labor cotton could not be raised. Nor was the stake 
of the North in the trade much less than that of 
the South, since the North largely supplied the capi- 
tal and the machinery of distribution, while the 
debts which Southern improvidence contracted had 
made the North its creditor for an enormous sum. 
May, the abolitionist, was called out from an anti- 
slavery meeting at New York by a leading mer- 
chant of the city, who said to him: "Mr. May, we 
are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a 
great evil, a great wrong. But it was consented to 
by the founders of our republic. It was provided 
for in the Constitution of our Union. A great por- 
tion of the property of the Southerners is invested 
under its sanction ; and the business of the North as 
well as the South has become adjusted to it. There 
are millions upon millions of dollars due from 
Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this 
city alone, the payment of which would be jeop- 
ardized by any rupture between the North and the 
South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your 
associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow 

' (43) 



slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us ; it 
is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford 
to let you succeed ; and I have called you out to let 
you know, and to let your fellow-laborers know, 
that we do not mean to allow you to succeed. We 
mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down — by fair 
means if we can, by foul means if we must."" It is 
still rather hard for a rich man to enter into the 
kingdom of heaven. Slavery was not less clearly 
an economical mistake than it was a moral wrong, 
slave labor being more costly than free labor, as 
well as less intelligent. This was demonstrable, but 
it was slavery that owed the millions to the mer- 
chants of New York. Nor was the influence of the 
South over the North political and commercial alone, 
it was also social. Aristocracy, albeit the aris- 
tocracy of slave-owners, or even of slave-breeders, 
imposed upon the mercantile Yankee, though in all 
essential respects he was far superior to the South- 
erner, as Venetian aristocracy had once imposed 
upon the mercantile Florentine. Southern mag- 
nates brought their high airs and their ostentation 
of chivalry to Washington and the Northern water- 
ing-places, while Southern youths were the mirrors 
of fashion in Northern universities. Slavery gave 
the tone to society through all its circles down even 
to the lowest. The boot-black was for slavery, as well 
as the Boston or New York financier, and felt that 

(44) 



he caught a ray of aristocracy thereby. The Eoman 
CathoHc Irish, who were now immigrating in large 
numbers, indemnified themselves for their oppres- 
sion in their own country by setting their feet upon 
the negro, whose subjection they learned to prize as 
giving them a comparative elevation, and they went 
almost as one man into the party of slavery. The 
War of 1812, made by a triumph of Southern pas- 
sion over Northern principle, had been followed at 
once by a triumph of military sentiment and a 
relaxation of Puritan morality. Moreover, the 
development of commerce and the oj ening of new 
mines of wealth by the extension of canals, the in- 
troduction of railways and the spread of settlement, 
had turned the minds of men to gain, made them 
desirous of political quiet, and indisposed them to 
moral effort. Under such influences people easily 
laid any flattering unction to their souls, persuading 
themselves that the slaves were better off than they 
would have been in Africa, that they could not be 
set free without danger of a massacre, that the 
constitutional impediments to emancipation were 
insuperal)le, that the faith of the nation pledged to 
the South must be kept, and that, as the American 
Republic was the peculiar care of heaven, every- 
thing must come right in the end. Seldom has a 
nation been in a more dangerous mood or more in 
need of the moral crusader. The churches were 

(45) 



controlled, and the pulpits either silenced or tuned in 
favor of slavery by the commercial interests and the 
political or social conservatism which prevailed in 
the congregations. The press was under the censor- 
ship of slavery, which extended not only over jour- 
nalism but over literature. Foreign books, if they 
contained anti-slavery sentiments, were expurgated 
for the American market. So national morality 

was dumb. 

(46) 



V. 



Ancient slavery was bad enough. Let those who 
dote on Athenian civilization turn from the pages 
of Plato or the marbles of Phidias to the lines in the 
" Frogs " of Aristophanes playfully rehearsing the 
tortures which were applied to the slaves at Athens, 
though there the system of slavery was lightest. 
Let those who are captivated by the stately aspect 
of high and cultivated society at Eome think of the 
slave chained to the rich man's threshold, of the 
gangs of slaves immured in dungeons and worked 
like beasts, of the servile wars and the horrors of 
the vengeance which followed, of the filthy licen- 
tiousness of which slaves were the wretched minis- 
ters. Yet ancient slavery came to some extent in 
the course of nature. It seemed natural and right 
to a philosopher like Aristotle, whose writings are, 
for his age, full of humanity, and who could speak 
beautifully and tenderly about affection. In itself 
it did no more violence to the moral sense of the 
slave-owner than is done to the moral sense of the 
red ant when he makes the black ant his thrall. It 
was to some extent justified by the circumstances 

(47) 



of the community in days in which war was the 
general state and the freemen formed a warrior 
class defending the industrial class, to whom the 
enjoyment of security partly made up for the lack 
of freedom. Nor was it hopeless, since, there being 
no insurmountable barrier of race, the slave might 
look for a real emancipation, which placed him or 
his children on a level with the master class, and in 
the imperial court of Rome sometimes gave him 
the key of immense wealth and overweening power. 
Even without emancipation there might be real 
friendship and almost moral equality between a 
good master like Cicero and a slave like Tiro. In 
this way, and with reference to the ultimate out- 
come in human evolution, ancient slavery might 
be regarded as a sort of educational process applied 
to an inferior race. The possession of unlimited 
power over fellow -men must always corrupt; but 
ancient slavery did not so far corrupt the master 
class as to prevent it from i)roducing noble and 
beautiful characters, as well as rendering the most 
brilliant intellectual services to civilization. Negro 
slavery in the Southern States, and wherever else 
it existed, was a hideous anachronism; it was a 
winter fallen into the lap of the human spring. It 
was utterly shocking to the moral sense, as the re- 
morse of the more virtuous slave-owners and the fury 
of the more wicked alike proved. If ever it had been 

(48) 



patriarchal, even in the best households of the South, 
it had retained no vestige of that character in the 
plantations where slaves were worked to death like 
beasts for the profit of a master who never saw 
them, by an overseer who scarcely knew their 
names. Calhoun's fine theory of the more complex 
and perfect family, with its three domestic relations 
instead of two, was belied by every plantation, and 
by every large plantation most signally belied. Be- 
sides, where was the family of the slave? That a 
subject race was undergoing a process of education 
could not seriously be maintaind when it was denied 
the freedom of instruction even in the rudiments 
of knowledge, freedom of meeting even for the 
purpose of worship, freedom of intercourse, freedom 
of locomotion — everything, in short, that could 
raise it above the condition of beasts. The negroes 
were deliberately and systematically embruted by 
law, lest, becoming intelligent, they should aspire 
to liberty. Moral elevation there could be none 
where stable wedlock was denied and parental rela- 
tions were set at naught ; husband and wife, parent 
and child, being sent to separate auction-blocks 
when the interest of the slave-holder gave the word. 
It was averred that the slave was happy. If he 
was, even in the most swinish way, why the chains, 
why the blood -hounds, why the demands upon the 
North for increased strictness in the execution of 

(49) 



the fugitive -slave laws? Why was it assumed by 
the opponents of emancipation that if the slaves 
were set free their first act would be the massacre of 
their masters? The accounts of cruelties practised on 
slaves it is needless and would be odious to rehearse. 
They are as well attested as they are sickening.* 
In Tennessee, a Slave State, but not a centre of the 
venom of slavery, a negro who had killed his master 
was burned alive at a slow fire, a thousand citizens 
coolly looking on, and the editor of a paper, who 
was a Methodist preacher, saying that he would 
himself not only have taken part but have proposed 
that the negro, instead of being merely burned, 
should be torn to pieces with red-hot pinchers. f If 
the large plantation, where the overseer was driv- 
ing the negroes to death that he might boast of 
having raised the largest crop, was the chief scene 
of these horrors, they would not fail to occur more 
or less wherever j)assion was unbridled and its vic- 
tims were helpless, while the community took the 
guilt upon its conscience and compromised its mo- 
rality by connivance, if not by tacit approbation. 

* See Rankin's "Letters on American Slavery," especially 
Letter VIII. See also Olmsted's " Journej-s and Explorations in 
'the Cotton Kingdom," Vol. II., Chapter V. 

f Olmsted's " Journejs and Explorations in the Cotton King- 
dom, " II. , 352. Another case is given in the same volume, 
page 349. Judge Jay told Mr. Olmsted that he had evidence in 
his ijossession every year for twenty years. 

(50) 



Unlike ancient slavery, negro slavery in America 
was hopeless, for color was a fatal bar to fusion, 
and the lot of the freed negro, a hated and sus- 
pected pariah, was little better than that of the 
slave. The effect on the character of the masters 
could not be doubtful. It was deplored by the best 
men of the South. Gentlemen no doubt the South 
had, with the ease and grace of manner and the 
flowing hospitality which assured position, wealth, 
and freedom from toil or trade often produce ; but 
the normal outcome of domestic despotism was the 
fire-eater and the bully. Unlike the ancient slave- 
owner, the American slave-owner was consciously 
trampling on humanity. If he desperately tried to 
persuade himself that the negro whom he deprived 
of his wages and tore from his wife and children 
was not a man, what had he to say about the 
existence all around him of mulattoes and quad- 
roons? Participation in the trade of slave-breeding, 
which had taken the place of the foreign slave- 
trade, must have been utterly fatal to the character 
of a gentleman. The young planter was reared by 
negro nurses and comiDanions in grossness and moral 
filthiness as well as in the habit of tyranny. An 
actual slave-driver daily lashing helpless men and 
women could never fail to take the impress of his 
trade. The "mean whites," if they were not em- 
ployed in slave-driving, eschewed industry, w^hich 

(51) 



they deemed the badge of the slave, and lived a life 
little better than vagabondage, while they were 
servile dependents on the great planters, though 
their hearts were full of the evil pride of race. 
Drinking, gambling, and fighting were their pleas- 
ures. 

Olmsted has left us an inestimable picture of 
society in the Cotton States as it was before the 
war. Evidently it was barbarism, masked by a 
thin veneer of luxury and high living, with little 
real comfort or refinement on the top. The Cotton 
States had no literature or science. Even the 
boasted hospitality of the South seems to have been 
little more than the rich man's craving for comptviiy 
in a social waste. The higher industries, with their 
civilizing influence, were excluded not only by the 
economical but by the social and political conditions 
of a system which a body of free and intelligent 
mechanics would have overturned. The commerce 
of the whites with the black women who were in 
their power could not fail to impair the dignity and 
purity of domestic life. Nor could property in 
female quadroons and octoroons fail to give birth 
to a commerce of lust. If the consignment by a 
heartless white of his own offspring to the slave - 
dealer was rare, it was not unknown. The churches, 
instead of combating the power of evil, put on its 
livery, consecrated its wrong-doings, and wrested 

(52) 



the Gospel to its service. One Church sanctioned 
polygamy when ordained by the cupidity of the 
slave-breeder, and another endorsed the rule exclud- 
ing negro evidence. Not one of them seems even 
to have preached mercy, much less justice. All 
this may be freely recounted now, shice the South, 
having not only lost slavery, but renounced it, the 
whole story belongs to the past ; though something 
of the barbarous recklessness of human life engen- 
dered by the system lingers in its old seats, and 
the lynching of negroes, instead of bringing them 
to regular trial, is still terribly common. 

In its fall the slave power was glorified by splen- 
did feats of arms. The virtues of the soldier, if 
any, were those which a system teaching scorn of 
industry was likely to breed in the dominant race. 
But it was by the love of country, and by the spirit 
of men defending their homes against an invader, 
more than by slavery, or even by the pride of race, 
that the arm of Southern heroism was moved. Of 
the many who fought bravely on those famous fields 
only a mere fraction were owners of slaves. 

The advocates of slavery wrought themselves up 
at last to the belief that it was the indispensable 
basis of a republic. They talked even of relighting 
the torch of liberty at the altar of slavery. They 
had the ancient republics in their minds, as had 
Roiisseau when he lapsed into the same heresy. 

(53) 



But those republics were not democracies; they 
were oligarchies of warriors more or less narrow. 
To a truly democratic republic, such as the United 
States aimed at being, slavery with its oligarchy of 
masters was deadly poison. This its advocates 
themselves proclaimed when they poured scorn on 
a commonwealth of "greasy mechanics," and 
avowed their belief that slavery would be the right 
relation everywhere between the employer and the 
employed. On the other hand, it had great politi- 
cal strength of an aggressive kind. Its political 
leaders and representatives in Congress were held 
together by a firm bond of social and commercial in- 
terest. Their minds were entirely devoted to politics ; 
they had almost a life-tenure of their seats, while 
other members of Congress held their seats by the 
precarious tenure of popular favor: amid an as- 
sembly of merchants and platform speakers they 
were statesmen ; in this respect the country has 
not since produced their jieers. They imposed by 
their assumption of social superiority, by the lofti- 
ness of their bearing, and by their familiarity with 
the habit and language of command. No w^onder 
if the republic was almost at their feet ! 

In 1831 there was arising of slaves at Southamp- 
ton, in Virginia, headed by Nat Turner, who appears 
to have been half -crazed. The houses of planters 
were burned, planters and their families were slain, 

(54) 



A terril)le outpouring of white vengeance ensued. 
In an assembly of the A^irginia Legislature which 
followed, voices were raised against slavery as the 
bane and peril of the State. These were the dying- 
accents of the anti-slavery sentiment which had been 
freely expressed by Virginian patriots such as Jef- 
ferson and Randolph. More in keeping with exist- 
ing sentiment was the protest that "a slave-owner 
had as good a right to the child of his own slave as 
to the foal of his own mare." Abolitionism in Vir- 
ginia was thenceforth silent, and the hope of eman- 
cipation from within had breathed its last. 

If slavery did not exist in the North, caste did, 
and with even greater intensity than at the South, 
where the planter's children, brought up by negro 
nurses, learned habits of familiarity with the race, 
and where, the black man having as a slave no more 
social pretensions than a dog, the white man could 
not be compromised by the contact. At the North 
the negro was free, but a pariah, or something lower 
still. He was not allowed to associate with the 
whites in any way. His children could not be in 
the public school with them. He could not sit down 
to table with them, or sit beside them in the theatre 
or the street-cars. He could not worship beside 
them in the churches, where it was proclaimed in 
the name of Christ that God had made all races of 
one blood to dwell together on the earth. He was 

(55) 



excluded from all professions, from all the higher 
callings, and even from all handicraft of the skilled 
kind, nothing being left to him but manual and 
menial labor. "Where is the use," plaintively 
murmured an intelligent negro boy, " of me trying to 
learn, when I can never be anything but 'a nigger' ?" 
His presence and touch were hardly less offensive 
than those of the vilest animal. Most men would 
probably have thought less of being convicted of 
sharp practice in commerce, or of any crime of vio- 
lence short of murder, than of a serious derogation 
from white caste in intercourse with a negro. The 
very mention of a mixed marriage would have been 
worse than blasphemy. Had the slaves been white 
the w^hole scene would have been changed, and 
slavery would have been swept away in a flood of 
philanthropic sentiment. It was color that was 
fatal, and fatal in a sense in which perhaps Garri- 
son never allowed. his thoughts to dwell. The only 
bright point in the horizon was England, where 
humanity had triumphed and emancipation was 

close at hand. 

(5G) 



VI. 



Emancipation immediate, unconditional, and 
without compensation — such was the platform on 
which Garrison had now taken his stand, and such 
were the doctrines which the Liberator, as soon as 
it got fairly under way, began to preach. The first 
article followed upon the belief in the utter wrong- 
fulness and sinfulness of slavery, which was the 
necessary basis of the moral and religious move- 
ment, and in grasping which Garrison had grasped 
the sole and certain assurance of victory. If 
man could have no property in man, he could no 
more have property for a day than for ever. The 
slave was at once entitled to his freedom ; he was 
entitled to set himself free if he could by flight or 
by insurrection. If the slaves who were shipped in 
Mr. Todd's vessel had risen upon the crew, tumbled 
into the hold or even killed those who resisted, and 
carried the vessel into a free port, they would have 
been doing right in the eyes of all but the slave- 
owner and his friends. For the same reason it was 
logical to protest against any condition not imposed 
in the interest of the slave. But conditions might 

(57) 



be imposed in the slave's interest, to smooth and 
safeguard a transition which no reasonable man 
could believe to be free from peril. The policy of 
provisional apprenticeship was adopted for that 
purpose by the British Parliament, and though 
without practical success, certainly without moral 
wrong. But in refusing to sanction compensation 
to the slave-owner, Garrison would surely have gone 
astray. What is or is not property in the eye 
of morality, morality must decide. What is or is 
not property in a particular community is decided 
by the law of that community. The law of the 
American community had sanctioned the holding of 
property in slaves, and though the slave was not 
bound by that law the community itself was. Men 
had been induced to invest their money in slaves 
under the guarantee of the public faith, and eman- 
cipation without compensation, so far as the re- 
public was concerned, would have been breach of 
faith and robbery. The slave-owner had sinned no 
more in holding slaves than the State had sinned in 
sanctioning his possession, and if a sacrifice was to 
be made to public morality, equity demanded that 
it should be made by all alike. The British legis- 
lature, overriding extremist proposals, acted upon 
this principle ; and it did right. What the conscience 
of the individual slave-owner might dictate to him 
was another affair. To declare that there should 

(f)8) 



be no compensation, and thus to threaten a power- 
ful body of proprietors with beggary, would have 
been to make the conflict internecine. After the 
civil war it was sorrowfully recalled that the price 
of the slaves w^ould have been about six hundred 
millions, which would have been a cheap redemption 
from a struggle which cost eight thousand millions 
of dollars, besides the blood and havoc. If the 
Liberator had been instrumental in preventing such 
a settlement, a dark shade of responsibility would 
rest upon its pages. But it is not likely that the 
settlement ever could have taken place. Not the 
commercial interest alone of the slave -ow^ner, but 
his political ambition and his social pride were 
bound up with the institution. If he had been 
willing to part with his crops of cotton and tobacco, 
he would not have been willing to part with his 
aristocracy. Nor would it have been easy, when 
the State had paid its money, to enforce the real 
fulfilment of the bargain. Even now, when the 
South has been humbled by defeat, it is not easy 
to make her obey the law. Nothing more than the 
substitution of serfage for slavery w^ould probably 
have been the result. Any such scheme, however, 
would scarcely have been feasible for a government 
like that of the American republic. The redemp- 
tion of the slaves in the West Indies had been 
conceived and carried into effect by the imperial 

(59) 



government and Parliament, acting ui^on tiie de- 
pendencies with autocratic power. A czar conceived 
and carried into effect the emancipation of the serfs 
in Russia. But a measure of this kind could hardly 
have been conceived, much less could it have been 
carried into effect, amid the fluctuations of popu- 
lar suffrage and the distractions of political jDarty. 
It is probable that the conflict was really irrepres- 
sible, and doomed to end either in separation or 
civil war. 

The salutatory of the Liberator avowed that its 
editor meant to speak out without restraint. "I 
will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as 
justice. On this subject I do not wish to think or 
speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell 
a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate 
alarm ; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from 
the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to grad- 
ually extricate her babe from the fire into which it 
has fallen — but urge me not to use moderation in 
a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will 
not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not re- 
treat a single inch — and I will be heard !" This 
promise was amply kept. Some of Garrison's best 
friends, and of the best friends of his cause, com- 
plained of the severity of his language, and their 
complaint cannot be set aside as unfounded. Rail- 
ing accusations are a mistake, even when the delin- 

(60) 



quent is Satanic. Unmeasured and indiscriminate 
language can never be justified. Washington had 
inherited an evil kind of property and an imperfect 
morality in connection with it; but no one could 
have called him a man-stealer; and there were still 
owners of slaves to whom the name as little be- 
longed. Citations of the controversial invective of 
Luther and Milton will avail us nothing; the age 
of Luther and Milton was in that respect uncivilized. 
A youth dealing with a subject on which his feel- 
ings are excited is sure to be unmeasured. How- 
ever, it was to the conscience of the nation that 
Garrison was appealing ; and an appeal to conscience 
is unavoidably severe. Nothing will warrant the 
appeal but that which necessitates severity. The 
voice of conscience herself within us is severe. In 
answer to the clergymen who shrank from him, or 
professed to shrink from him, on account of the 
violence of his language, Garrison might have 
pointed, not only to passages in the Hebrew proph- 
ets, but to passages in the discourses of Christ. 
He might have reminded them of the language in 
which they were themselves, every Sunday in the 
pulpit, warning men to turn from every sin but 
slavery. With no small force he pleaded that he 
had icebergs of indifference around him, and it 
would take a good deal of fire in himself to melt 
thein. To hate and denounce the sin either in the 

(61) 



abstract or as that of a class or community is not 
to hate or denounce the individual sinner. To an 
individual slave-owner who had shown any disposi- 
tion to hear him, Garrison would have been all cour- 
tesy and kindness. We may be sure that he would 
have clasped at once to his heart any slave-owner 
who had repented. Having, to use his own figure, 
taken in his hand the trumpet of God, he resolved to 
blow a strong blast. He could not believe that there 
was a sin without a sinner, nor could he separate 
the sinner from the sin. There was much wrath 
but no venom in the man. If there had been venom 
in him it would have belied his countenance and 
deportment. Miss Martineau, not an uncritical ob- 
server, was profoundly impressed with the saint-like 
expression and the sweetness of his manner. In 
private and in his family he was all gentleness and 
affection. Let it be said, too, that he set a noble ex- 
ample to controversial editors in his fair treatment 
of his opponents. Not only did he always give in- 
sertion to their replies, but he copied their criticisms 
from other journals into his own. Fighting for free- 
dom of discussion, he was ever loyal to his own 
principle. 

What is certain is that the Liberator, in spite of 
the smallness of its circulation, which was hardly 
enough to keep it alive, soon told. The South was 

moved to its centre. The editorials probably would 

(63) 



not have caused much alarm, as the slaves could not 
read. What was likely to cause more alarm was 
the frontispiece, which spoke plainly enough to the 
slave's eye. It represented an auction at which 
"slaves, horses, and otlier cattle " were being offered 
for sale, and a whipping-post at which a slave was 
being flogged. In the background was the Capitol 
at Washington, with a flag inscribed " Liberty " float- 
ing over the dome. There might have been added 
the motto of Virginia, Sic semper fyraiinis, and 
perhaps some extracts from the republican orations 
with which even now the South was celebrating the 
victory of French liberty over Charles X. On seeing 
the Liberator the realm of slavery bestirred itself. 
A Vigilance Association took the matter in hand. 
First came fiery and bloodthirsty editorials; then 
anonymous threats; then attemj^ts by legal enact- 
ment to prevent the circulation of the Liberator at 
the South. The Grand Jury of North Carolina found 
a true bill against Garrison for the circulation of a 
paj)er of seditious tendency, the penalty for which 
was whipping and imprisonment for the first offence, 
and death without benefit of clergy for the second. 
The General Assembly of Georgia offered a reward 
of five thousand dollars to any one who, under the 
laws of that State, should arrest the editor of the 
Liberator^ bring him to trial, and prosecute him to 
conviction. The South reproached Boston with 

(63) 



alk)wiiig a battery to be planted on her soil against 
the ramparts of Southern institutions. Boston felt 
the reproach, and showed that she would gladly hav^ 
suppressed the incendiary print and perhaps have 
delivered up its editor ; but the law was against her, 
and the mass of the people, though wavering in their 
allegiance to morality on the question of slavery^ 
were still loyal to freedom of opinion. When a 
Southern Governor appealed to the Mayor of Boston 
to take proceedings, the Mayor of Boston could only 
shake his head and assure his Southern friend that 
Garrison's paper was of little account. The reward 
offered by the General Assembly of Georgia looked 
very like an incitement to kidnapping. Justice to 
the South recpiires it to be said that nothing of the 
kind was ever attempted, nor was the hand of a 
Southern government visible in any outrage com- 
mitted against abolitionists at the North, though 
individual Southerners might take part, and the 
spirit of the Southern fire-eater was always there. 

It was just at this time that the South and its 
clientage at the North were thrown into a paroxysm 
of excitement by the Bloody Monday, as Nat Turner's 
rising at Southampton was called. The rising was 
easily suppressed, and Virginia saw, as Jamaica has 
since seen, how cruel is the panic of a dominant race. 
Not the slightest connection of the outbreak with 
Northern abolitionism was traced. That Garrison or 

(64) 



any one connected with him ever incited the slaves 
to revolt, or said a word intentionally which could 
lead to servile war, seems to be utterly untrue. His 
preaching to the slaves, on the contrary, was always 
patience, submission, abstinence from violence, 
while in his own moral code he carried non-resistance 
to an extreme. Moreover, his championship held 
out hope, and what goads to insurrection is despair. 
The most incendiary thing ever uttered was the 
judgment of Chief Justice Taney, who laid it down 
that the slave had no rights against his master, 
since it plainly followed, if the slave had no rights 
against his master, that the master had no rights 
against the slave, and that the slave was morally at 
liberty, when he could, to steal the master's goods or 
cut his throat. Of the evils of slavery the Liberator 
could hardly speak in words more inflammatory 
than those v/hich had been used by the Virginian 
Jefferson and Randolph, or even than those which 
w jre used by some members of the Virginian Assem- 
bly in 1831, To suppose that the slaves when set 
free would fall upon their masters and murder them 
was absurd ; they might rise to break their chains, 
but why should they rise when their chains were 
broken? Mr. Birney's slaves, when emancipated, 
cheerfully took service under him as free laborers. 
The horrors of St. Domingo were committed not by 
free negroes, but by slaves grievously oppressed, 

(65) 



among whom had been thrown the torch of revohi- 
tion and civil war. More than once the whites have 
massacred the blacks, but the blacks have never in 
a state of freedom massacred the whites. When at 
last the slaves in the South were enfranchised by 
Northern arms, hardly a single case of outrage 
committed by them against their masters was re- 
corded. The masters, as well as the abolitionists, 
are entitled to the benefit of that fact, while the 
slaves are entitled to it most of all. 

The nearest approach made by Garrison to strong 
measures was his approval of the Quaker policy of 
extinguishing slavery by refusing to buy its prod- 
ucts, or boycotting it, to use the now familiar term. 
He does not seem, however, to have relied greatly 
on this plan, nor was it worth much. Products are 
indistinguishably blended ; interests are blended still 
more indistinguishably ; the Quaker, if he was in 
trade, though he might refuse to wear a cotton shirt 
or to smoke tobacco, could never be safe against 
having gains made by the sale of cotton or tobacco 
in his pocket. 

Hardly less arduous than the war to be waged 
against slavery in the South was the war to be 
waged against the exclusiveness of race at the 
North. Garrison bravely trampled upon caste, and 
in every way identified himself personally with the 
negroes. Moral courage in those days could no 

(66) 



further go. Ilis efforts in this direction, however, 
we cannot help regarding with a pensive misgiving. 
He, Kke the enthusiasts of AboUtion, had persuaded 
himself that color was nothing, that the feeling about 
it was a mere prejudice, that the black man not only 
was a brother to be taken at once to the white man's 
heart, but was in every respect, intellectual as well 
as moral, the white man's equal, and, to prove him- 
self so, wanted nothing but education. To the 
allegation of some pro-slavery fanatics that the negro 
was not a man, or not of the same species as the 
white, the existence on a large scale of a mixed creed, 
the offspring of white lust abusing its command of 
negro women, was, as has already been said, an 
answer hideously conclusive. That the antipathy 
and the contempt felt for the African were extrav- 
agant, and even vile, that they were largely conse- 
quent on the brand of slavery which was capable of 
being removed, that the negro had never had fair 
play, and till he had, it was unjust to disrate him, 
intellectually or morally, was most true. In his 
native land, it might be said, the climate, combined 
with the seductive lavishness of nature, induced 
torpor and repressed effort. To Hayti, it might be 
urged, he had been brought in the slave-ship only 
to pass through a most cruel and degrading bond- 
age into a tornado of revolutionary strife and blood. 
What he would be in such a country as the United 

(G7) 






States and under the happier traming of American 
institutions still remained to be seen. In Hayti he 
had produced Toussaint, as to whose character there 
could be no doubt, and as little as to his capacity, 
since he had the honor of being kidnapped and mur- 
dered as a dangerous man by the great Napoleon. 
But the social delibilityof color unhappily was a 
dream ; the physical antipathy is a fact which can- 
not be put out of sight ; the intellectual inferiority 
of the negro, as a rule, whether it be congenital and 
ingrained, or the mere effect of circumstance and 
thus capable of effacement, is a fact not to be gain- 
said ; and out of the grave of slavery in the South 
has risen, apparently defying solution, the problem 
of the races. To touch the tenderest point : Garrison 
demanded the repeal of a Massachusetts law fining 
any one who should marry a negro or an Indian to 
a white, and he bore with perfect serenity the jeers 
which his chivalry provoked. But he married a 
white woman. Would he have married a black? 
Could he have borne to see his son bringing 
home a black wife, or his daughter in the arms of 
a black husband? Unless those questions can be 
answered in the affirmative, here was a part of the 
problem, the depth of which he had not sounded, 
and the difficult and almost desperate character of 
which, were he now alive, he would be forced to ac 



knowledge. 



(68) 



The determination to keep the negro down and 
deny him education was not much less strong at the 
North than at the South. Prudence Crandall, a 
school teacher, at Canterbury, Conn . , finding that a 
negro girl would not be admitted among the whites, 
tried, with Garrison's sanction, to open a school for 
negro girls alone. The town was in a ferment. Miss 
Crandall was boycotted, she and her pupils were 
insulted, the door and steps of her house were 
smeared with filth, and her well was polluted. As 
she still held her ground, outraged caste procured 
an enactment subjecting to fine and imprisonment 
any person who should set up anywhere in Con- 
necticut a school for resident colored pupils not 
members of the State. When the law was passed, 
bells were rung and cannon were fired. Miss Cran- 
dall was indicted and sent to jail. Counsel was 
found for her by Arthur Tappan, who had paid Gar- 
rison's fine at Baltimore, and a long law-suit ended 
in a failure of the prosecution only on technical 
grounds. But the school was broken up by violence, 
the house was set on fire, assaulted by a midnight 
mob with clubs and wrecked ; nor was there any 
redress. Let it be noted that these things were 
done not by magnates of New York commerce or 
city servants of Mammon, but by the rural pojDula- 
tion of a New England State. A scheme for found- 
ing a negro college at New Haven was crushed at 

(69) 



once by a protest of the leading citizens, "as an un- 
warrantable and dangerous interference with the 
internal concerns of other States, and as incompat- 
ible with the prosperity, if not with the existence, 
of the present institutions of learning. " The Fac- 
ulty of Yale, by their silence, approved the mani- 
festo.* 

The Liberator Avas the voice of one crying in the 
wilderness; to give it practical force, embodiment 
in an organization was required. The New Eng- 
land Anti-Slavery Society was accordingly formed. 
It took that name and inscribed " Immediate Eman- 
cipation" on its banner, after some pleading in favor 
of a feebler aim and a milder appellation among the 
more timid, whose hesitation was overborne by the 
strong will of Garrison. It was finally organized 
in the year lS32,in the school room under the African 
Baptist Church in Belknap Street, Boston. " Of the 
adjourned meeting," says Mr. Johnson, "my recol- 
lections are very vivid. A fierce north-east storm, 
combining snow, rain, and hail in about equal pro- 
jwrtions, was raging, and the streets were full of 
slush. They were dark, too, for the city of Boston 
in those days was very economical of light on 'Nig- 
ger Hill. ' It almost seemed as if nature was frown- 
ing upon the new effort to abolish slavery. But 

* Johnson's "Garrison and the Anti-Slavery Movement," 119- 
138. 

(70) 



the spirits of the httle company rose superior to all 
external circumstances. " The preamble of the Con- 
stitution was as follows : 

"We, the undersigned, hold that every person of 
full age and sane mind has a right to immediate 
freedom from personal bondage of whatsoever kind, 
unless imposed by the sentence of the law for the 
commission of some crime. We hold that man can- 
not, consistently with reason, religion, and the eter- 
nal and immutable principles of justice, be the prop- 
erty of man. We hold that whoever retains his 
fellow-man in bondage is guilty of a grievous 
wrong. We hold that a mere difference of com- 
plexion is no reason why any man should be deprived 
of any of his natural rights or subjected to any polit- 
ical disability. While we advance these opinions as 
the principles on which we intend to act, we declare 
that we will not operate on the existing relations of 
society by other than peaceful and lawful means, 
and that we will give no countenance to violence or 
insurrection." 

There is nothing in this fanatical or extravagant 
in the eyes of any one who believes that the negro 
is a man. Yet it cost the association the allegiance 
for a time of Child, Loring, and Sewall, two of 
whom had been the pecuniary mainstay of the Lib- 
erator. Those who signed, to the apostolic number 
of twelve, were William Lloyd Garrison, Oliver 

(71) 



Johnson, Robert B. Hall, Arnold Biiffum, William 
J. Snelling, John E. Fnller, Moses Thacher, Joshua 
Coffin, Stillnian B. Newcomb, Benjamin C. Bacon, 
Isaac Knapp, and Henry K. Stockton — hardly any 
of them, according to Mr. Johnson, worth a hundred 
dollars. However, after signing they stepped out 
with glad hearts into the dark and stormy night. 
The objects of the society were defined to be "to 
endeavor, by all means sanctioned by law, human- 
ity, and religion, to effect the abolition of slavery in 
the United States, to improve the character and con- 
dition of the free people of color, to improve and cor- 
rect public opinion in relation to their situation and 
rights, and obtain for them equal civil and political 
rights and privileges with the white.'' A reason- 
able aim, the real equality of the African with the 
white man in political capacity being always pre- 
supposed. 

(72) 



VI. 

The forces placed under Garrison's command by 
the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery So- 
ciety were at once led by him to the attack of .the 
Colonization Society, in which he now saw the dead- 
liest foe of his cause, though it had at one time en- 
gaged his sympathy. The declared object of the 
Colonization Society was to found on the coast of 
Africa a colony, such as Liberia is, as an asylum 
for negroes who had been set free in the South, 
and at the same time as an experimental seed-plot 
and centre of African civilization. It is just, as 
well as charitable, to assume that the intentions of 
the founders had been sincere and good, though 
Webster expressed suspicion from the first. The 
position of a free negro at the South was abject 
•and hopeless, while belief in the necessity of sep- 
arating the races, which this policy implied, had, 
as has already been hinted, a stronger foundation 
than Garrisonians were willing to allow. But the 
Society seems by this time to have really degener- 
ated into a safety-valve for slavery and a drug for 
the conscience of the North. It unquestionably had 

(78) 



sinister support. As a solution of the (question its 
policy was almost farcical, since the number of ne- 
groes whom it could carry off was a mere driblet 
compared with the yearly increase from breeding 
and the contraband trade. Its great crime in Gar- 
rison's eyes, however, was that it treated the negro 
as an alien, whose presence was a calamity to him- 
self and to the State, not as an American citizen 
under a cloud of unmerited of)i3ression who ought 
to be set free and made happy in the land of his 
birth or adoption. He assailed its doctrines and jDur- 
poses in a pamphlet deemed his masterpiece. It 
was certainly a strong point to be al^le to say that 
of all the officers of the Society nearly three-fourths 
were slave-ow^ners, yet not one of them had emanci- 
pated a slave to be sent to Liberia; that the Presi- 
dent was the owner of a thousand slaves, and that 
a former President had offered a large reward to 
any one who w^ould capture a runaway female and 
13ut her into any jail in the United States. But it 
was when he came to the assumj^tion of the perpet- 
ual degradation of the ne_gro that the writer's wrath 
burst into flame. " The detestation of feeling, the 
fire of moral indignation, and the agony of soul which 
I have felt kindling and swelling within me, in the 
progress of this review, under this section reach the 
acme of intensity." The doctrine and sentiments 
of the pamphlet estranged so many as nearly to kill 

(74) 



tlu' L/l)er(ito)\ but its sale, being large, brought 
timely relief to the excheciuer. 

Garrison now got himself deputed to England, 
where the emissaries of the Society had been enlist- 
ing sympathy and support in the name of Aboli- 
tionism, and had led astray even Clarkson and oth- 
ers of the elect. Addressing colored meetings on 
his road and dodging by his movements persecu- 
tors who were on his track, he made his way to 
New York and sailed for England as the represen- 
tative of American Abolitionism, May 2, 1833, being 
then not twenty-eight years of age. He found the 
British measure on the eve of becoming law. As 
it included compensation and apprenticeship, he was 
inclined to regard it with disdain, though he might 
have learned a lesson from its steadfast justice, if 
not from its practical wisdom. He was heartily re- 
ceived, and among other attentions paid him, was 
invited to breakfast by Buxton. When he entered, 
his host, instead of taking his hand at once, scanned 
him with a look of surprise, and inquired with an 
accent of doubt whether he had the pleasure of ad- 
dressing Mr. Garrison, of Boston, in the United 
States. Being told that he had, he hfted up his 
hands and exclaimed, " Why, my dear sir, I thought 
you were a black man! and I have consequently 
invited this company of ladies and gentlemen to 

be present to welcome Mr. Garrison, the black ad- 

( 7.-, ) 



vocate of emancipation from the United States of 
America." Garrison took this as a high compH- 
ment, since it implied a hehef that no white 
American would plead as he had done for the slave. 
He might further have welcomed the incident as 
a proof that the negro, in a land where he had not 
borne the brand of slavery, was not an object 
of social abhorrence. Garrison also had the honor 
of breakfasting with Wilberforce, and was deeply 
impressed by his serene patience under bodily suffer- 
ing, his silvery voice, his benevolent smile, the look 
of intellect in his eye, the union of fluency sLnd 
modesty in his discourse, the exactness and ele- 
gance of his diction, the combination of dignity 
with affability and simplicity in his manner. The 
harmony of gentleness with energy and moral might 
reminded Garrison of Christ and the Apostles. The 
frail and puny frame curled up on a sofa struck 
him as a curious contrast to the colossal majesty of 
Daniel Webster; and he had yet to see that in 
Webster's body dwelt a mighty intellect- but not so 
great a soul. Soon after Wilberforce died, and at 
the end of the august funeral procession at West- 
minster Abbey, headed by Wellington and Pell, 
walked the editor of the Liberator. 

Garrison was successful in his mission. He con- 
vinced the British Abolitionists, if not that the Col- 
onization Society was "the mystery of iniquity," 

(7fl) 



that its objects were eqiiivocal and that it was un- 
deserving of their support. To this they set their 
hands; Clarkson alone, who was Wind and at the 
mercy of informants, persisting in neutraUty for 
the time. The agent of the Society was discom- 
fited and left the field. Garrison had a successful 
meeting in Exeter Hall, the temple of Evangelical 
•philanthropy, and addressed it at great length. 
Citing the denunciation of the American slavehold- 
ers by O'Connell, whose memory must always be 
honored among those of the enemies of slavery, he 
said that never was a more just and fearless rebuke 
given to a guilty nation, adding that whatever re- 
sponsibility might attach to Great Britain for the 
introduction of slavery into the United States 
^and the talk of robbery and kidnapping as thmgs 
that might be entailed, in his opinion was precious 
absurdity) , from the first moment in which the people 
of the United States pubHshed their Declaration of 
Independence to the world, they became exclusively 
accountable for the existence and continuance of 
negro slaverv. OXbnnell had promised to be at 
the meeting and speak, but he had forgotten all 
about it. He was found at a breakfast, just rismg 
to address the company. A note of reminder hav- 
ing been slipped into his hand, he drove off at once 
to'the hall, and, as Garrison said, "threw off his 
magnificent speech as he threw off his coat." To 

(77) 



Garrison's ear, invective against slavery was sure 
to be magnificent if it was full-bodied, and for full- 
bodied invective O'Connell was the man. "The 
American slave-owners," said the orator, "are the 
basest of the base, the most execrable of the exe- 
crable. I thank God that upon the wings of the 
press the voice of so humble an individual as my- 
self will pass against the western breeze — that it 
will reach the rivers, the lakes, the mountains, and 
the glens of America — and that the friends of lib- 
erty there will sympathize with me, and rejoice that 
I here tear down the image of liberty from the rec- 
reant land of America, and condemn her as the 
vilest of hypocrites, the greatest of liars." The 
press did carry these words against the western 
breeze, and they could not fail to prepare for Gar- 
rison a warm reception on his return. 

It must be owned that he was now, both in point 
of principle and of policy, on somewhat slippery 
ground. It is incumbent on a reformer to fulfil all 
righteousness, and to render to Csesar all things 
that to-day belong to Caesar, though he may hope 
that the ultimate effect of his preaching will be the 
dethronement of Csesar, and the enthronement of 
a better power. Garrison avowed himself, on phil- 
anthropic questions at least, a cosmopolitan; he 
declared that his country was the world, and his 
countrymen were all mankind. This w^as well ; but 

(T8) 



the hour of cosniopontanisiu had not yet fully come, 
and meantime it was necessary to keei3 terms with 
national sentiment, not on grounds of policy merely, 
but because patriotism, which could hardly be dis- 
severed from national sentiment or even from na- 
tional pride, was a part of the virtue of ordinary 
men. ' However, if Garrison was advancing too fast 
or too far, it was at all events on a line on which, if 
our most generous hopes are fulfilled, humanity 
would some day overtake him. 

On his return Garrison was received as a traducer 
of his country ; a meeting to organize an Anti-Slav- 
ery Society in the city of New York, for which he 
chanced to come in, was mobbed, and the Abolition- 
ists were all driven from the hall except one im- 
perturbable Quaker, who retained his seat and 
disconcerted the invaders by his laconic serenity. 
A threatening mob beset the Liberator office at Bos- 
ton. The pro-slavery press of course opened tire. 
But Garrison, in face of the storm of shot, nailed 
his colors to the mast. " I speak the truth, pain- 
ful, humiliating, and terrible as it is; and because 
I am bold and faithful to do so, am I to be branded 
as the calumniator and enemy of my country? If 
to suffer sin upon my brother be to hate him in my 
heart, then to suffer sin upon my country would be 
an evidence, not of my love, but hatred of her. 
Sir, it is because my affection for her is intense and 

(T9) 



paramount to all selfish considerations that I do not 
parley with her crimes. I know that she can neither 
be truly happy nor prosperous while she continues 
to manacle and brutalize every sixth child born on 
her soil. Lying lips are speaking 'peace, peace to 
her, but she shall not see peace until the tears of 
her repentance shall have washed away every stain 
of blood from her escutcheon. ' " " They, " concluded 
Garrison, "were the real traducers of the country, 
who by their practices were dishonoring her before 
the world." This was the true philosophy of the 
matter, but a populace is not philosophic. 

Here a bright ray of domestic happiness falls on 
the dark and troubled scene. On September 4, 1884, 
Garrison was married to Miss Helen Benson, whose 
father was a member of the philanthropic circle, 
and who had himself been first drawn to Garrison 
as a philanthropist. As soon as it was known that 
the Amalgamationist was about to be married, the 
mouths of the mockers of course were opened. They 
were playfully informed in reply that they would 
soon be enabled to decide whether the editor of the 
Liberator' was going to espouse a white or a black 
woman. The woman whom he did espouse and in 
whom he found an excellent wife, far from resem- 
bling the "Americans called Africans," as the Abo- 
litionists styled the negroes, was plump and rosy, 
with blue eyes and fair brown hair. In justice to 

(SO) 



the opponents of Garrison, and to those who have 
inherited the desperate difficulties of the race prob- 
lem, it must be noted once more that if he was an 
Amalgamationist it was in theory only, and that 
amalgamation lay nearer the root of the whole ques- 
tion than he ever allowed himself to perceive. 

Hitherto there had been only the New England 
Society and some other local societies. A great step 
in advance was taken October 29, 1833, by the call 
of a convention for the formation of the American 
Anti-Slavery Society. The call was signed by Ar- 
thur Taj^pan, President, Joshua Leavitt, one of the 
Managers, and Elizur Wright, Jr., Secretary of the 
New York City Anti-Slavery Society. The meet- 
ing-place was Philadelphia, to which in the begin- 
ning of December the Abolitionists made their way, 
though Whittier, and j)erhaps not he alone, had to 
contend with the difficulties of a slender purse. On 
the road Garrison got into conversation with a fel- 
low-passenger, who did not know him by sight, on 
the subject of slavery. The stranger was most fav- 
orably impressed by Garrison's exposition, and said 
that if all Abolitionists were like him there would 
be less opposition to the enterprise. " But, sir, de- 
pend upon it, tliat hare-brained, reckless fanatic, 
Garrison, will damage if he does not shipwreck any 
cause." "Allow me, sir, to introduce you to Mr. 
Garrison," said a fellow -delegate, the Rev.S. J. May. 

(81) 



On the morning of December the 4th between fifty 
and sixty delegates, representing ten of the twelve 
free States, made their way, greeted as they went 
with abusive language, to Adelphi Hall, which they 
found guarded by the police. The police, in spite 
of the popular ferment, seems always to have done 
its duty. The assembly consisted largely of young 
men. Beriah Green was President of the conven- 
tion. An attempt had been made to get the chair 
taken by a PhiladeljDhian whose character would 
give the meeting an air of respectability, but of 
course in vain. Garrison was deputed to draft a 
Declaration of Principles. This he did between ten 
at night and eight in the morning, w^hen he was 
found with shutters closed and lamjD burning just 
writing the last paragraph. We may be sure that 
the matter was already beforehand in his mind; 
perhaps to a great extent had taken form. The 
declaration was accepted as he drew it, with the 
exception of a paragraph directed against his hated 
enemy, the Colonization Society, which was wisely 
stricken out as a needless attack on the dying. The 
good Thomas Shipley took exception to the term 
" man-stealer " as applied indiscriminately to the 
slave-owners., and, to quiet his scruples, the words 
" according to Scripture" were inserted ; Mr. Garrison 
objecting on the ground that this would make the 
rights of man dependent upon a text. Mr. May says 

(82) 



that he never in his Hfe saw a deeper impression 
made by a document. "After the voice of the 
reader had ceased, there v^^as a profound silence for 
several minutes. Our hearts were in perfect unison. 
There was but one thought with us all. Either of 
the members could have told what the whole con- 
vention felt. We felt that the word had just been 
uttered which would be mighty, through God, to the 
pulling down of the strongholds of slavery. " The 
manifesto is admirable from Garrison's point of view, 
and, given entire, it will be a fair exposition of his 
aims as well as a good specimen of his literary work. 

DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS. 

The Convention assembled in the city of Philadelphia to 
organize a National Anti-Slavery Society, promptly seize the 
opportunity to promulgate the following Declaration of Senti- 
ments, as cherished by them in relation to the enslavement of 
one-sixth portion of the American people. 

More than fifty -seven years have elapsed since a band of pa- 
triots convened in this place to devise measures for the deliver- 
ance of this country from a foreign yoke. The corner-stone 
upon which they founded the Temple of Freedom was broadly 
this ■. " That all men are created equal ; that they are endowed 
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among 
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." At the 
sound of their trumpet-call, three millions of people rose up as 
from the sleep of death and rushed to the sti-ife of blood ; deem- 
ing it more glorious to die instantly as freemen than desirable 
to live one hour as slaves. They were few in number, poor in 
resources; but the honest conviction that Truth, Justice, and 
Right were on their side made them invincible. 

We have met together for the achievement of an enteii^rise 
without which that of our fathers is incomplete ; and which, 
for its magnitude, solemnity, and probable results upon thedes- 
■' (S3) 



tiny of the world, as far transcends theirs as moral trutli does 
physical force. 

In purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of 
purpose, in intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in 
siuceritj' of spirit, we would not be inferior to them. 

Their iirinciples led them to wage war against their oppres- 
sors, and to spill human blood like water, in order to be free. 
Ours forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us 
to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of all 
carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage, relying solely 
upon those which are spiritual, and mighty through God to the 
pulling down of strongliolds. 

Their measures were phj'sical resistance — the marshalling in 
arms — the hostile array — the mortal encounter. Ours shall be 
such only as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption 
— the destruction of error by the potency of truth — the overthrow 
of prejudice by the power of love — and the abolition of slavery 
by the spirit of repentance. 

Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in compar- 
ison with the wrongs and sufferings of those for whom we plead. 
Our fathers were never slaves— never bought and sold like cattle 
— never shut out from the light and knowledge of religion — 
never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters. 

But those for whose emancipation we are striving — constitut 
ing at the present time at least one sixth part of our country- 
men — are recognized by law and treated by their fellow beings 
as marketable commodities, as goods and chattels, as brute 
beasts , are plundered daily of tlie fruits of their toil without 
redress ; really enjoy no constitutional nor legal protection from 
licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons , and are 
ruthlessly torn asunder— the tender babe from the arms of its 
frantic mother — the heart broken wife from her weeping hus- 
band — at the caprice or pleasure of in-esponsible tyrants. For 
the crime of having a dark complexion they suffer the pangs of 
hunger, the infliction of stripes, the ignominy of brutal servi- 
tude. They are kept in heathenish darkness by laws expressly 
enacted to make their instruction a criminal offence. 

These are the prominent ciicumstances in the condition of 
more than two millions of our people, the proof of which may 
be found' in thousands of indisputable facts and in the laws of 
the slave holding States. 

Hence we maintain— that, in view of the civil and religious 
(84) 



privilpgesof tliis nation, the guilt of its oppression is unequalled 
l)y any otlu-r on the face of the earth ; and, therefore, that it is 
bound to repent instantly, to undo the heavy l)urdens, and to let 
the oppressed go free. 

We further maintain — that no man lias a right to enslave or 
imbrute his brother — to hold or acknowledge him, for one mo- 
ment, as a piece of merchandise — to keep back his hire by fraud 
— or to brutalize his mind by denying him the means of intel- 
lectual, social, and moral improvement. 

The riglit to enjoy lilicrty is inalienalile. To invade it is to 
usurp the prerogative of Jehovah. Everj' man has a right to 
his own bod}'— to the products of his own lal)or — to the protec- 
tion of law — and to the common advantages of society. It is 
piracy to buy or steal a native African, to sul)ject him to servi- 
tude. Surelj' the sin is as great to enslave an American as an 
African. 

Therefore we believe and aflfirm — that there is no difference, 
in principle, between the African slave trade and American 
slavery : 

That every American citizen who retains a human being in 
involuntary bondage as his property is, according to Scripture 
(Exodus xxi.16), a man-stealer 

That the slaves ought instantly to be set free and brought 
vmder the protection of law : 

That if they had lived from the time of Pharaoh down to the 
present period, and had been entailed through successive gener- 
ations, their right to be free could never have been alienated, 
but their claims would have constantly risen in solemnity . 

That all those laws which are now in force, admitting the 
right of slavery, are therefore, before God, utterly null and 
void ; being an audacious usurpation of the Divine prerogative, 
a daring infringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow 
of the very foundations of the social compact, a complete 
extinction of all the relations, endearments, and obligations 
of mankind, and a presumptuous transgression of all the holy 
commandments ; and that therefore they ought instantly to be 
abrogated. 

We further believe and affirm — that all persons of color who 
possess the qualifications which are demanded of othei's ouglit 
to be admitted forthwith to the enjoyment of the same privi- 
leges and the exercise of the same jjrerogatives as others ; and 
that the 2«iths of preferment, of wealth, and of intelligence 

(85) 



should be opened as widelj' to them as to persons of a white 
complexion. 

We maintain that no compensation should be given to the 
planters emancipating their slaves ; 

Because it ^\'ould be a surrender of the great fundamental 
principle that man cannot hold propei'ty in man : 

Because slavery is a crime, and therefore is not an article to 
be sold : 

Because the holders of slaves are not the just proprietors of 
what they claim ; freeing the slave is not depriving them of 
property, but restoring it to its rightful owner ; it is not wrong- 
ing the master, but righting the slave — restoring him to him- 
self : 

Because immediate and general emancipation would only de- 
stroy nominal, not real, property ; it would not amputate a lin.b 
or break a bone of the slaves, but, by infusing motives into 
their breasts, would make them doubly valuable to the masters 
as free laborers ■ and 

Because, if compensation is to be given at all, it should be 
given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who 
have plundered and abused them. 

We regard as delusive, cruel, and dangerous any scheme of 
expatriation which pretends to aid, either directly or indirectly, 
in the emancipation of the slaves, or to be a substitute for the 
immediate and total abolition of slavery. 

We fully and UTianimously recognize the sovereignty of each 
State to legislate exclusively on the subject of the slavery which 
is tolerated within its limits ; we concede that Congress, under 
the present national compact, has no right to interfere with any 
of the slave States in relation to this momentous subject ; 

But we maintain that Congress has a right, and is solemnly 
bound, to suppress the domestic slave-trade between the several 
States, and to abolish slavery in those portions of our territory 
which the Constitution has placed under its exclusive jurisdic- 
tion. 

We also maintain that there are, at the present time, the 
highest obligations resting upon the people of the free States to 
remove slavery by moi-al and political action, as prescribed in 
the Constitution of the United States. They are now living 
under a pledge of their ti'emendous physical force, to fasten the 
galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of millions in the 
Southern States ; they are liable to be called at any moment to 

(80) 



suppress a general insurrection of the slaves ; they authorize the 
slave owner to vote for three -fifths of his slaves as property, and 
thus enable him to perpetuate liis oppression ; they support a 
standing army at the South for its protection , and they seize 
the slave who has escaped into their territories, and send him 
back to be tortured by an enraged master or a brutal driver. 
This relation to slavery is criminal, and full of danger ; it must 
be broken up. 

These are our views and principles — these our designs and 
measures. With entire confidence in the overruling justice of 
God, we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Indepen- 
dence and the truths of Divine Revelation, as upon the Ever 
lasting Rock. 

We shall organize Anti-Slavery Societies, if possible, in every 
city, town, and village in our land. 

We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, 
of warning, of entreaty, and of rebuke. 

We shall circulate, unsparingly and extensively, anti-slavery 
tracts and periodicals. 

We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the 
suffering and the dumb. 

We shall aim at the purification of the churches from all par- 
ticipation in the guilt of slaverJ^ 

We shall encourage the labor of freemen rather than that of 
slaves by giving a preference to their productions , and 

We shall spare no exertion nor means to bring the whole 
nation to speedy repentance. 

Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may personally be 
defeated, but our principles never ! Truth, Justice, Reason, Hu- 
manity, must and will gloriously triumph. Already a host is 
coming up to the help of the Lord against the mighty, and the 
prospect before us is full of encouragement. 

Submitting this Declaration to the candid examination of the 
people of this country and of the friends of liberty throughout 
the world, we hereby affix our signatures to it ; pledging our- 
selves that, under the guidance and by the help of Almighty 
God, we will do all that in us lies, consistently with this Dec- 
laration of ovu" principles, to overthrow the most execrable 
system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth ; to 
deliver our land from its deadliest curse ; to wipe out the foulest 
stain that rests upon our national escutcheon ; and to secure to 
the colored population of the United States all the rights and 

(87) 



privileges vvliich belong to them as men and as Americans- 
come what may to our persons, our interests, or our reputations 
— whether we live to witness the triumph of Liberty, Justice, 
and Humanit}', or perish untimely as martyrs in this great, be- 
nevolent, and holy cause. 

Done at Philadelphia, the 6th day of December, A.D. 1833. 

If slavery was a wrong not less grievous than 
taxation without representation on the smallest 
scale and in the mildest form, the second Philadel- 
phia Declaration might fairly challenge comparison, 
both in importance and in righteousness, with the 
first. 

" To bring the Vv'hole nation to speedy repentance " 
was the special object of this Convention and of the 
movement which it embodied. It was the object of 
no other association or movement, and it was the 
one thing needful. In this lies the value and the 
interest of the founder's life. Repentance there 
could not be without conviction of sin, nor could 
there be conviction of sin without bringing home its 
sinfulness in plain language to the conscience of the 
misdoer. On the subject of the clauses refusing 
compensation to the slave-owner and of the argu- 
ments by which the refusal is supported, enough 
has already been said. Arthur Tappan was made 
president of the Association, and Garrison left Phil- 
adelphia rejoicing in the work in his hands. 

(88) 



VII. 

A CRITICAL step was taken by the Abolitionists 
when George Thompson, the British Anti-Slavery 
lecturer, with whom. Garrison had formed a close 
alliance in England, was brought over to the United 
States to assist in the crusade. Thompson was an 
eloquent as v/ell as an excellent man, and had done 
good service to the cause in his country. But not 
only was he a foreigner, he was one of a nation 
against which American prejudice was strong, and 
the prejudice of the Irish, who formed a large and 
most violent element of the pro-slavery democracy, 
stronger still. Emancipation, it is true, was the 
cause of mankind ; it morally transcended all na- 
tional boundaries ; but what is morally transcended 
cannot always in practice be safely ignored. The 
intervention of a Frenchman in the British strug- 
gle for abolition would certainly have kindled the 
wrath of Tories and West Indian proprietors to an 
extraordinary degree. After the Civil War, when 
the victory was won, Thompson's services were ac- 
knowledged and his mission was ratified by the rep- 
resentatives of the American people, who bestowed 

(SO) 



on him piil)lic honors. But when, at the call of 
Garrison and tlie Anti-Slavery Society, he came 
over as the representative of British abolitionism, 
to help the cause in America, he ran no small risk 
of causing an explosion which, l)esides its conse- 
quences to himself and his party, might, had he been 
killed or seriously maltreated, have set the two gov- 
ernments by the ears. The arrival of the British 
emissary and his appearance on the Anti-Slavery 
platform, where he did not fail to show his power, 
inflamed the popular wrath to fury. Nor was it the 
wrath of the masses only that was inflamed, but that 
of the wealthy, respectable, and orthodox. Advant- 
age was taken of the reaction caused at once by the 
hateful intervention of the Englishman and by the 
violence of Garrison's language, to concert a flank 
movement in the shape of a convention of moderates 
to form an American Union for the Eelief and Im- 
provement of the Colored Race. Privately it was 
avowed that its object was to put down Garrison 
and his friends. On the afternoon of August 21, 
1835, the social, political, religious, and intellectual 
chiefs of Boston filled that cradle of liberty, Faneuil 
Hall, with the mayor in the chair. The resolutions 
arraigned the Abolitionists as agitators, who sought 
to excite servile insurrection and to " scatter among 
our Southern brethren firebrands, arrows, and death. " 
But what galled most evidently was the presence of 

(90) 



"a certain notorious foreign agent, an avowed em- 
issary sustained by foreign funds, a professed agi- 
tator upon questions deeply, profoundly political, 
which lay at the very foundation of our Union.'' 
Mr. Garrison, from the quiet retreat of "Friend- 
ship's Valley," the home of his wife's father, where 
he was reposing, sent to the Liberator wdiat the 
chroniclers of his life justly called " unstinted com- 
ments " upon the speeches and sj)eakers of Faneuil 
Hall. "Where are you, sir?" — thus he apostro- 
phized one of the speakers — "In amicable compan- 
ionship and popular repute with thieves and adul- 
terers; with slave-holders, slave-dealers and slave- 
destroyers ; with those who call the beings whom 
God created but a little lower than the angels things 
and chattels; with the proscribers of the great chart 
of eternal life ; with the rancorous enemies of the 
friends of universal emancipation; with the dis- 
turbers of the public peace; wdth the robbers of the 
public mail ; with ruffians who insult, pollute, and 
lacerate helpless women; and with conspirators 
against the lives and liberties of New England citi- 
zens." To the taunt that he dared not go to the 
South, where his preaching was most needed. Gar- 
rison could always retort with force. Had he not 
published an anti-slavery journal in Maryland, and 
in Baltimore, a den of the domestic slave-trade? 
Had he not suffered imprisonment on account of the 

(91) 



boldness of his denunciations? Had he not contin- 
ued the publication as long as subscribers could be 
found? Did the friends of Polish or Greek freedom 
in Boston make it a point of honor to go and de- 
nounce Eussian tyranny in the dominions of the 
Czar, or Turkish tyranny in the dominions of the 
Sultan? Did those who used the taunt, he might 
have asked, wish that he should be murdered, and 
that their friends at the South should be his mur- 
derers? His original intention, in the abandonment 
of which fear had no part, was to bring out his 
journal at Washington, where slavery prevailed and 
Southern fire-eaters abounded. 

The appeals made at the Fanueil Hall meeting to 
the feeling against Thompson bore their fruit. The 
result was a riot got up, one of the organs of the 
party being witness, not by a rabble but by "men of 
property and standing," who had a large interest at 
stake in the community, and were determined, let 
the consequences be what they might, " to put a stop 
to the impudent, bullying conduct of the foreign 
vagrant, Thompson, and his associates in mischief !" 
Thompson was expected to speak at a meeting of the 
Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Fortunately he was 
not there; had he fallen into the hands of the mob, 
it is certain that he would have been tarred and 
feathered, and not unlikely that he would have been 
lynched. Missing their intended victim, the mob 

(92) 



laid hands on Garrison, put him in peril of his life,, 
tore his clothes off his back and dragged him through 
the streets with a rope round his body, evidently 
meaning mischief, though cries arose to spare " the 
American," and there seems to be no reason to think 
that the mob intended murder. He was rescued 
from the fangs of his enemies by Mayor Lyman, 
who saw no other way of placing him in safety than 
committing him to prison, to which he was accord- 
ingly consigned, the crowd surging fiercely round 
the carriage as he went. It is due to the mayor to 
say that, though he did not do all that ought to 
have been done, he seems to have done the best he 
could. In the prison, much torn and l)attered. Gar- 
rison spent the night. On the wall of his cell he 
wrote: "William Lloyd Garrison was put into this 
cell on Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to 
save him from the violence of a 'respectable and 
influential ' mob, who sought to destroy him for 
preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine 
that 'all men are created equal,' and that all 
oppression is odious in the sight of God. 'Hail, 
Columbia!' Cheers for the Autocrat of Eussia and 
the Sultan of Turkey ! Eeader, let this inscription 
remain till the last slave in this despotic land be 
loosed from his fetters." Thompson happily got 
safe out of the country. To some of those who 
denounced him in Fanueil Hall, he might have 

(93) 



replied that he came to America by the same right 
by which they sent an emissary of the Colonization 
Society to England. 

Cool critics say that the sufferings and perils un- 
dergone by the Abolitionists have been overstated, 
as those of martyrs after their canonization are apt 
to be. That the Abolitionists had to run the social 
gantlet cannot be denied. But they were also 
mobbed in many places. At New York, Lewis Tap- 
pan's home was sacked, and violence reigned till it 
excited the alarm of the wealthy men at whose beck 
it had broken loose. Thompson had stones and brick- 
bats flung at him, and was, as we have seen, in peril 
of his life. An Anti-Slavery hall at Philadelphia was 
burned down close to the spot on which the Declara- 
tion of Independence had been signed. We have 
seen what befell Miss Crandall. The office of Bir- 
ney's paper was destroyed by a mob at Cincinnati. 
At Nashville, Tenn., Amos Dresser, a divinity stu- 
dent, was publicly flogged and expelled from the 
city for having anti-slavery publications in his trunk. 
Another Abolitionist was tarred and feathered, and 
subjected to exposure which shortened his days. 
At Alton, in Illinois, Elijah Lovejoy lost his life in 
defending himself and a party of his friends against 
the ruffians by whom they were besieged. Pro- 
slavery justices of the peace dealt with Abolitionists 

as vagabonds, and Emerson had reason for saying 

(94) 



that there was a mob judiciary as well as a mob 
legislative. This was Andrew Jackson's hour, and 
the spirit of violence and tyranny was abroad. In 
the South, men suspected of abolitionism were 
lynched, Vigilance Committees were formed, and 
fanatical journals gave vent to threats of abduction 
and assassination which, though no attempt was 
ever made, or was ever very likely to be made, to 
carry them into effect, might well disturb a North- 
ern Abolitionist's sleep. At Charleston the Abo- 
litionist matter w^as taken out of the mails and 
burned before a great concourse of citizens in the 
public square. Garrison and two of his coadjutors 
being burned in 'effigy at the same time; while the 
Jacksonian Postmaster-General, Kendall, told the 
Charleston postmaster that though he could not 
approve he would not condemn his conduct. The 
Abolitionists did not brave what the first Christians 
braved, but they did brave a good deal. 

Thompson, as the foreigner who had dared to in- 
terfere in this matter, figured in a message of Pres- 
ident Jackson to Congress, recommending the pro- 
hibition, under severe penalties, of the circulation 
through the mails of incendiary publications intended 
to instigate the slaves to insurrection. It is need- 
less to repeat that no such intention existed, nor was 
insurrection likely to be instigated by the hope 
which the publications bore with them of peaceable 

( 95 ) 



redemption. Turner and the slaves who rose with 
him at Southampton against the cruelty of their 
masters, we may be cure, had not been reading 
Garrisonian publications. This, like the struggle 
to prevent the presentation of petitions against slav- 
ery in Congress, and the threats of putting the com- 
mon law in motion against the Abolitionists, was 
an attempt to gag freedom of opinion. Whether 
opinion should be free thenceforth, then became a 
momentous though collateral issue, and to the ad- 
vantage of the Garrisonians; for the Northern 
people, let it be said once more, were still loyal at 
heart in their allegiance to a principle which is the 

greatest and clearest gain of our modern civilization. 

(96) 



VIII. 

Being now (l.'-i.SS) leader as well as editor, and 
by help of the society partly released from the shac- 
kles of editorship, Garrison went forth as a travelling 
missionary and took the platform. He had not the 
physical jjowers of a great platform speaker, but he 
seems to have been always impressive, and if the 
specimens of his oratory which we have before us 
were delivered without notes, he had the mental 
gifts of the orator in liberal measure. By Sumner, 
at a later period, his speaking was compared to a 
rain of fire ; and by Lowell, a better judge of taste 
than Sumner, it was highly praised. He seems 
also to have had perfect self-possession on the plat- 
form, even amid the most furious storms, though 
his temperament v/as nervous, and he sat paralyzed 
in a carriage while a restive horse was backing him 
to destruction. His experiences in his tours were 
of course varied. In one place he was received 
with sympathy, in another with howls, and perhaps 
with rotten eggs. But he is always cheery, even 
when he has to contend with sickness as well as with 
a froward generation, and you see that he heartily 
enjoys scenery and incident as he goes along. 

(97) 



Between the efforts of Thompson and Garrison, 
with the aid of such backers as OHver Jolmson and 
Samuel J. May, the movement bore fruit apace. 
Thirteen hundred anti-slavery societies were pres- 
ently spread over the Northern States. Important 
recruits came into the Abolition camp. Among 
them was the able, excellent, and very wealthy Ger- 
rit Smith, whose accession was the more creditable 
to him because Garrison, with inflexible severity, 
censured his course in the very article of conversion. 
Among them also were James Russell Lowell and 
Edward Quincy. But the most notable was Wen- 
dell Phillips, whose witness was the more striking 
because he was a scion of Bostonian wealth and 
aristocracy, while his eloquence, a unique combina- 
tion of vehemence and fervor with grace, polish, 
and persuasiveness, would have made the fortune 
of any cause. The orator in him was revealed at 
an indignation meeting called at Fanueil Hall to 
denounce the killing of Love joy, the Abolitionist, 
at Alton. Attorney-General Austin, a pro-slavery 
man, there excused the Alton riot by the example 
of the Boston tea riot, upon which Wendell Phillips 
sprang to his feet and retorted: "Sir, when I heard 
the gentleman lay down principles which place the 
rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Mount Ben- 
edict [the scene of an anti- Catholic outrage] and 
Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with 

(98) 



Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured Hps 
[pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have 
broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American — 
the slanderer of the dead. The gentleman said that 
he should sink into insignificance if he dared to 
gainsay the principles of these resolutions. Sir, for 
the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated 
by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patri- 
ots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed 
him up!'' There were points, however, in the char- 
acter of this highly-gifted man which made his 
accession in the end not unalloyed gain to the cause. 
Ellis Gray Loring, a lawyer of mark, bearer of a 
name afterward honorably known to patriots in 
connection with the Civil War, had enlisted from 
the beginning. 

Boston, her plutocracy strangely allied with her 
mob, remained flint-hearted. Not a church or hall 
for an anti-slavery meeting could be had there, 
and after nineteen rebuffs the society had to meet 
over a stable. But the State had begun to be of a 
different mind from the city, and an application to 
the legislature for the use of the Hall of Eepresent- 
atives was granted without debate, though not 
without a nearly successful attempt to revoke the 
concession. 

There was plenty of work for the moral force 
which had thus been generated to do. There was 

(99) 



no (Iniiger of its energy being wasted, as the energy 
of such movements sometimes is, for want of a re- 
sisting medium, h'ke gunpowder exploded in the open 
air; for the South was thorouglily roused and was 
acting on the offensive, seeing that in acting on the 
offensive lay her only chance of safety. Nor was it 
to mere safety that she now asj)ired, but to exten- 
sion and dominion. The Garrisonians were called 
upon to combat legislative movements, directed by 
the South and her henchmen in the North against 
freedom of speech ; to vindicate in the courts the 
right of slaves brought North to their liberty, and 
of fugitives claimed as slaves to the ordinary safe- 
guards on their trial ; to ply Congress with petitions 
for the abolition of slavery in the District of Colum- 
bia ; to oppose the admission of new Slave States 
into the union, and the efforts of Southern filibusters 
to wrest Texas from Mexico and annex her to the 
realm of slavery. And the treatment of the colored 
seamen in Southern ports, the tampering with the 
mails, and the offer of Southern legislatures of 
rewards for the apprehension of Garrison, which 
looked so like setting a price uiwn his head. Gov- 
ernor Everett, always zealous in the cause of Slav- 
ery, proposed to put the common law in force 
against the Abolitionists, and the Garrisonians were 
heard before a Committee of the Legislature in bar 

of such a proceeding. 

CiOO) 



Garrison, however, while lie saw with pleasure 
the influence which the growing strength of the 
Abolitionist vote was beginning to exercise on pol- 
iticians, steadfcistly refused to give his movement 
the form of a political party. There his moral in- 
sight and his personal disinterestedness stood him 
and his cause in good stead. He said that if Abo- 
litionism once made a political party, it must be like 
otlier political parties. It must in the first place, 
like them, have its machinery, costly as well as evil. 
Then it would lose its character for disinterested- 
ness: unprincipled aspirants would swarm to it, 
making flaming Anti-Slavery pretensions but seek- 
ing loaves and fishes. Its principles would become a 
marketable commodity. Its leaders, instead of being 
champions of righteousness and preachers of na- 
tional repentance, would thenceforth be candidates 
for the Presidency or for Cabinet offices and the 
patronage connected with them. Other issues would 
for the sake of votes be mingled with Abolition, and 
would very likely choke it. In a purely moral cause 
one might put to flight a thousand ; but the success 
or defeat of a political party was a mere question of 
numbers. In this Garrison differed from Birney. 
The name of Birney is written in light as a cham- 
pion of Emancipation. Originally a slave-owner, 
he emancipated his slaves. He then devoted his 

own life to the advocacy of emancipation, facing 

(101) 



some violence and a great deal of hatred and slan- 
der, which to a man in his social position would be 
not less hard to endure than violence itself. Not 
unnaturally, though it is conceived wrongly, he 
came to the conclusion that to bring his force di- 
rectly to bear on national politics was the best way 
of accomplishing his object, and that this, under a 
system of party government, could only be done by 
organizing a party. He accordingly joined in or- 
ganizing the Liberty party, and was twice nomina- 
ted by it for the Presidency — in 1S4(>, and again in 
1S44, against Polk, a thorough-going upholder of 
Slavery, and Clay, the man of compromise. His 
character is the guarantee that no personal ambition 
mingled with his motives for accepting the nomi- 
nation. The result, however, confirmed Garrison's 
judgment. Birney polled just enough votes to de- 
feat Clay and throw the government directly into 
the hands of Slavery. This was no gain, though 
many tears were wasted over the defeat of Clay, 
who had no moral hatred of slavery, and was ready 
to compromise with it on almost any terms rather 
than risk the dissolution of the Union. Chance of 
success for Birney's party there had never been, and 
it is seldom that a cause can be served by rushing 
upon assured defeat, while the bitter estrangement 
of all Clay's supporters was the necessary penalty 
of an attempt which had deprived their idol of the 

( 102 ) 



election. Tlie experiment is instrnctive to all re- 
formers who are tempted to organize a new party. 
Even success would be disastrous, inasmuch as it 
would entail the necessity of a number of appoint- 
ments for which there would not be fit men, would 
call forth a swarm of office-seekers, and would bur- 
den the particular reform with a multitude of ques- 
tions entirely foreign to it and pertaining to the 
general policy of the State. 

"Whereas the American Church" — so ran a mo- 
tion brought forward at an Anti-Slavery convention 
by Mr. Garrison — " with the exception of some of its 
smaller branches, has given its undisguised sanction 
and support to the system of American Slavery, in 
the following among other ways, (1) by profound 
silence on the sin of slave-holding, (2) by tolerating 
slave-bidding, slave-trading and slave-holding in its 
ministers and members, (3) by receiving the avails 
of the traffic in slaves and the souls of men into the 
treasuries of its different benevolent institutions, 
and (4) by its indifference and opjDosition to the Anti- 
Slavery enterprise — there fore be it resolved, that the 
Church ought not to be regarded and treated as the 
Church of Christ, but as the foe of freedom, human- 
ity, and pure religion, so long as it occupies its 
present position." This is a severe indictment, con- 
cluding with a severe sentence. Its averments have 
been contested, but seem on the whole to have been 

(103) 



made good. Gerrit Smith, a m.oderate man, spoke 
not less decidedly, though less vehemently, than Gar- 
rison on the subject. Channing, with all his desire 
to preserve charity and avoid extremes, could not 
defend the conduct of the churches. Their unchris- 
tian refusal to treat the negro as a Christian brother 
and fellow-worshipper cannot possibly be denied. 
In the cases of the Eoman Catholic and the Episco- 
pal churches, this behavior can hardly be ascribed 
to cowardice, since it is more than doubtful whether 
either of them was at heart opposed to slavery . The 
Koman Catholic Church, it is believed, never put 
forth her power against slavery in Cuba, where it 
prevailed in its worst form, or even did much for 
the spiritual elevation of the slave ; nor more did she 
in Brazil and in the South American republics, when 
slavery existed there and she had everything her 
own way. The Eoman Catholic Bishop Hughes 
took up his pen in defence of the institution. More- 
over, the rank and file of the Eoman Catholic Church 
were Irish, the bitter haters and contemners of the 
negro. Of the loyalty of the whole Episcopal Church 
to slavery, Calhoun could speak with confidence, 
and he seems not to have been far wrong. Bishop 
Coxe, of Western New York, was at a later day 
one of the few decided opponents of slavery among 
the leaders of a Church which, ' socially as well as 
ecclesiastically conservative, was the asylum of Cop- 

( 104 ) 



perheads during the Civil War. In England Epis- 
copalians of the Evangelical section, such as Wil- 
berforce, had played a leading part in Abolition; 
but the High Church section, which was also Tory, 
had been for the most part actively or passively on 
the other side. Richard Hurrell Froude, a good 
representative of High Church feeling, in part of 
his diary relating to the West Indies, speaks of 
"the nigger" and of "Anti -Slavery cant " with a 
Virginian air. But the Protestant Churches, the 
Methodists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, must be 
held to have been sinning against light. They prac- 
tically admitted it themselves when, the South hav- 
ing seceded, and the social pressure under which 
they had bowed their heads to Baal having been 
removed, they passed at once to the Anti -Slavery 
and Unionist side. That they were maintaining a 
general code of Christian morality which, when the 
social thraldom was at an end, would extend its in- 
fluence to the subject of slavery is true, but is hardly 
an answer to the charge of apostasy on the great 
moral question of the day ; nor were ministers likely 
to produce much effect by dilating on the sins of 
the Canaanites or the Pharisees when it was plain, 
as it must have been even to the slave-traders of 
their congregations, that with regard to the most 
flagrant sin of their own generation they dared not 
speak the truth. The fear of a rupture with their 

(105) 



Southern branches, which were hopelessly bound up 
with slavery, furnishes perhaps a sounder excuse 
for the conduct of the Northern Churches, though it 
is difficult to understand how any Christian society 
can have highly valued its connection with clergy- 
men who promiscuously , advertised f(^r sale horses, 
wagons, cattle, and African Christians. The Meth- 
odist Church, it might be supposed, would be the 
least plutocratic, and we seem to sound the depths 
of the fall when we learn that the Methodist Gen- 
eral Conference at Cincinnati repelled with con- 
tumely a mild reprobation of slavery transmitted 
by the Wesley an Methodists of England, and that 
thirty Methodist ministers went to compliment Web- 
ster after the speech which numbered him with the 
apostates. The refusal of the Quakers, the great 
philanthropic sect, to help the slave was perhaps even 
more disappointing, but the Quakers were a com- 
mercial as well as a philanthropic body. Churches 
as well as the si)iritual man have their foundations 
in the dust. They depend on the purses of the con- 
gregation, and they have trustees as well as minis- 
ters. Sometimes in the course of Garrison's history 
we see the minister willing to allow the Liberator 
the use of a church, but forbidden by the trustees. 
The Primitive Christians, a society consisting of poor 
men, having all things in common and out of the 
pale of respectability, might set at defiance the so- 

( 106 ) 



cial sentiment of their age. But the American 
Churches were segments of American society, which, 
allowing the highest assignable influence to the pew, 
could hardly be expected to be actuated in its seg- 
ments by motives very different from those by which 
it was actuated in the mass. 

The Bible sanctioned slavery. This could not be 
denied. Nor on that issue could Archbishop Hughes, 
who maintained the affirmative, fail to score a point. 
The true answer with which the Abolitionists, not 
being historical critics, were hardly prepared, was 
that the Bible, though it sanctioned slavery, did 
not sanction American slavery. What it sanctioned, 
or at least recognized, Avas primeval slavery, which, 
like other features of primeval society, extended to 
the Hebrew polity as well as to the polities of other 
races. The slave code oi the Pentateuch is remark- 
able, compared with the other slave codes of anti- 
quity, not for its stringency, but for its mildness and 
the tendency which it shows to limit the power of 
the master over the slave ; so much so, that it might 
almost have been deemed by the Abolitionists the 
work of their precursors in Pentateuch ic days. The 
New Testament recognized slavery in the same man- 
ner as it recognized all the political and social in- 
stitutions of the day, the mission of Christianity 
not being revolution, but the changes in the heart 
from which all other beneficial changes in the end 

(107) 



would flow. The i^roclamation of the universal 
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man 
was morally the death -knell of slavery. Paul sent 
back Onesimus to Philemon ; but it was with the 
injunction to receive him as a brother beloved and 
as Paul himself. Abolitionists might have been 
willing to let the Southern slave-owner have back 
his runaways on those terms. 

Only the irrational Bibliolator, therefore, could im- 
agine that American slavery had the Bible on its 
side. But irrational Bibliolatry still prevailed. In 
the South, where it was seconded by interest, it had 
complete possession of the popular conscience. 
" Stonewall " Jackson appears to have been a very 
religious man, fighting as he thought in defence of 
a divine ordinance, and at the same time in fulfil- 
ment of the prophecy that Ham should be a ser- 
vant in the tents of his brethren. One of Crom- 
welPs soldiers would probably have done the same. 
He would have kept the negro in bondage as he 
would have smitten any one whom he identified with 
the Canaanite, and hewed any one whom he iden- 
tified with Agag in pieces before the Lord. Belief 
in the unqualified inspiration of the Old Testament 
and the permanency of its precepts has more than 

once made wild work with morality. 

(108j 



IX. 



Garrison had been a more than orthodox Baptist 
and a regular church-goer. He had looked to the 
churches as the appointed instruments for bringing 
the nation to a right mind. Bitter was his dis- 
appointment. He never did anything by halves. 
He not only withdrew his confidence from the 
churches, but violently broke with them and de- 
nounced them without measure. They were '' cages 
of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan." As 
to the clergy, Christianity indignantly rejected 
their sanctimonious pretensions; they were hire- 
lings and blind leaders of the blind, dumb dogs and 
spiritual popes; they loved the fleece better than 
the flock, and were mighty hindrances to the march 
of human freedom and the enfranchisement of the 
souls of men. Even Channing was treated with 
scant respect, though he wrote nobly against slav- 
ery, and went so far with Garrison as to say that it 
was better that the Union should be dissolved than 
that Texas should be received into it as a Slave State, 
while his greatness as a moral teacher could not be 
denied, and his hesitation (when he did hesitate) 

( l'>9 ) 



was evidently sincere. Channing apparently dis- 
liked organized agitation, preferring to rely on in- 
dividual conviction. It has been truly said that 
men differ as much in their spiritual as in their 
physical physiognomies, and the sj^iritual physiog- 
nomy of Channing was freedom. 

Not only did Garrison shake the dust off his feet 
against the chui-ches, hut he was led greatly to 
change his views as to the authority of the Bible, 
to which the churches appealed with apparent force 
as a warrant for connivance at slavery. The his- 
torical view of the question had not presented itself 
to his mind, and to him it was inconceivable that 
God should have sanctioned or permitted at one 
stage in the education of the race what was evil at 
another stage, A religious man — an intensely relig- 
ious man — he continued to be. He continued also 
to love the Bible and to make a constant use of its 
language in enforcing moral truth. In this no 
Puritan could exceed him. But he bade farewell 
to tradition, to authority, to inspiration. Here let 
him speak for himself, as he speaks well : 

"Of the millions who profess to believe in the Bible as the in- 
spired word of God, how few there are who have had the wisli 
or the courage to know on what ground they have formed their 
opinion ! They Iiave been taught that to allow a doubt to arise 
in their minds on this i)oint would be sacrilegious and to put 
in peril their salvation. They must believe in the plenary in- 
spiration of the 'sacred volume ' or they are 'infidels ' who will 
justly deserve to be 'cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.' 

(110) 



I 



Imposture may always be susjiected when reason is commanded 
to abdicate tlie throne ; when investigation is made a criminal 
act ; when the bodies or spirits of men are threatened with pains 
and penalties if they do not subscrilje to the popular belief ; 
when appeals are made to human credulity, and not to the un- 
derstanding. 

" Now. nothing can be more consonant to reason than that the 
more valuable a thing is the more it will bear to be examined. 
If the Bible be, from Genesis to Revelation, divinely inspired, 
its warmest partisans need not be concerned as to its fate. It is 
to be examined with the same freedom as any other book, and 
taken precisely for what it is worth. It must stand or fall on 
its own inherent ([ualities, like any other volume. To know 
what it teaches, men jnust not stultify themselves, nor be made 
irrational by a blind homage. Their reason must be absolute in 
judgment and act freely, or they cannot know the truth. They 
are not to object to what is simpl}^ incomprehensible — because 
no man can comprehend how it is that the sun gives light or 
the acorn produces the oak ; but what is clearly monstrous or 
absurd or imj^ossible cannot be endorsed by reason, and can 
never properly be made a test of religious faith or an evidence 
of moral character. 

"To say that everj^thing contained within the lids of the Bible 
is divinely inspired, and to insist upon the dogma as funda- 
mentally imi")ortant, is to give utterance to a bold fiction and 
to require the suspension of the reasoning faculties. To say that 
everything in the Bible is to be believed simply because it is 
found in that volume is equally absurd and pernicious. It is 
the province of reason to 'search the Scriptures ' and determine 
what in them is true and what false^what is probable and what 
incredible — what is compatible Avith the happiness of mankind, 
and what ought to be rejected as an example or rule of action — 
what is the letter that killeth, and what the spirit that maketh 
alive. When the various books of the Bible were written, or by 
whom they Avere written, no man living can tell. This is purely 
a matter of conjecture ; and as conjecture is not certainty, it 
ceases to be authoritative. Nor is it of vast consequence, in 
the eye of reason, whether they to whom the Bible is ascribed 
wrote it or not ; whether Paul was the author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, or any other Epistle w^hich is attributed to him ; 
whether Moses Avrote the Pentateuch, or Joshua the history of 
his own exploits, or David the Psalms, or Solomon the Prov- 

(111) 



erbs : or whether the real authors were some unknown persons. 
'What is writ is writ, ' and it must stand or fall hy the test of 
just criticism, by its reasonableness and utility, by the proba- 
bilities of the case, by historical confirmation, by human expe- 
rience and observation, by the facts of science, by the intuition 
of the spirit. Truth is older than any parchment, and would 
still exist though a universal confiagration should consume all 
the books in the world. To discard a portion of Scriptui-e is 
not necessarily to reject the truth, but may be the highest evi- 
dence that one can give of his love of truth. " 

Thus, in the eyes of the orthodox, Garrison be- 
came an "infidel," and was thenceforth branded by 
that name. Heterodox he certainly did become, 
though it must be repeated he remained intensely 
religious, and to compare him to the Jacobins was 
absurd. The Bible henceforth to him, though an 
infinitely precious, was not an inspired, book ; the 
House of God was " nothing but mere ordinary 
brick and mortar, "the Sabbath was like other days, 
and the office of a clergyman was "one which it 
was scarcely possible for any man to fill without 
loss of independence or spiritual detriment." "The 
infidelity of the Anti-Slavery movement, " said Gar- 
rison's sworn br^ther-in-arms, Samuel May, Jr., 
"consists in this simple thing, that it has out- 
stripped the churches of the land in the practical 
application of Christianity to the wants, wrongs and 
oppressions of our own age and our own country." 
This, it is true, was the original cause, but it was 
not the limit of the separation. Garrison had also 

been a strict Sabbatarian, but, with other ecclesias- 

(11'-') 



tical ordinances, he renounced the Sabbath. The 
churches had denounced the holding of Abolitionist 
meetings on that day. 

Another novelty which Garrison embraced was 
Woman's Rights. He had found woman very help- 
ful to him in Anti-Slavery work. Nor could any- 
thing be more reasonable than that women should 
take an active part in a great movement of social 
reform, and one which in certain aspects specially 
touched the interests and appealed to the hearts of 
their sex. This they might do in what all the world 
would allow to be a womanly way, as women in a 
womanly way had played an illustrious part in the 
foundation of Christianity. But it was a wide step 
from this to the convention, and a wider step to the 
platform. When Garrison's female helpmates, Ab- 
by Kelley and the Grimkes, took those steps they 
shocked a sentiment which was deeply rooted, and 
which they could not expect to be changed in a day. 
It might also be naturally felt that, while mob vio- 
lence was abroad, it was not delicate or even quite 
manly to expose women to the chances of such a 
fray. Garrison as usual went to the extreme length 
of his opinion, and asserted not only the right of 
women to take the moral and social platform, but 
the political equality of the sexes — a doctrine for 
which the world was very far from being prepared 
then, even if it is prepared now. The Grimke sisters, 

(113) 



Lucretia Mott,and Abby Kelley, appear by their suc- 
cess as speakers to have justified Garrison's faith in 
the charms of female eloquence. Yet few will con- 
tend that the products of the female platform have 
been so entirely lovely as to stamp all gainsayers 
with bigotry. A philanthropic but insane woman 
possessed with some fantastic notion of liberty was 
in the habit of talking at Anti-Slavery meetings 
in defiance of the authority of the Chair. The 
Chair having on one occasion ordered her at last 
to be removed, she was borne out by Wendell Phil- 
lips and two others, male members of the conven- 
tion. " I am better off," she cried, " than my Lord : 
he had only one ass to ride upon, I have three." 
Garrison had a keen sense of humor. We may be 
sure that he smiled at such incidents, but his ear- 
nest soul was not disturbed . This eccentric woman 
was not the only grotesque figure that sometimes 
intruded on his meetings. 

So far, however. Garrison was within the bounds 
of tenable, if not of indisputable, opinion. Unfort- 
unately he did not stop there. It was an age of ec- 
centricities, Utopias, and chimeras, religious, social, 
and political. The old beliefs were giving way. 
The narrowness of the churches and the meanness 
of their attitude on this very question of morality 
drove forth the free and aspiring into the wilder- 
ness. This was the day of Owen's socialist com- 

(114) 



muiiities, of Brook Farm, of Thoreaii's hermitage. 
Every man of intellect, as Emerson said, had the 
scheme of an ideal society in his pocket. Garrison's 
heart and mind were open, or, to use the phrase of 
one of his circle, hospitable to all schemes that 
seemed to promise increased happiness to mankind. 
Nor were the approaches to his faith much guarded. 
Through life he was addicted to patent medicines 
and other quackeries. He gave himself not only to 
novelties such as phrenology, homoeopathy, and hy- 
dropathy, but to clairvoyants, who diagnosed his 
maladies through the backs of their heads, and 
whose diagnosis he trusted when it agreed with his 
own. Phrenologists pronounced his bump of ideality 
large ; and he said that he should like to take up 
his abode in the country, that he might live in the 
ideal, if there was not so much in the world to be 
put right. Garrison even fell for a time under the 
spiritual influence of John Humphrey Noyes, the 
founder of the Oneida community, and a man of 
the same stamp as Harris, the founder of the Erie 
community, who obtained a strange ascendancy over 
Laurence Oliphant. Noyes taught the doctrine of 
Perfectionism, believing that sinlessness was at- 
tainable in this world and had by himself been at- 
tained. He also renounced all allegiance to temporal 
governments, including that of the United States, 
regarding them as creations of human wickedness, 

( IM) 



and assorting the title of Jesus Christ to the throne 
of the world. His practical attitude, however, 
toward governments was not that of rebellion, but 
of Non-Eesistance. Noyes was no doubt able and 
imposing, and he made a deep impression on Garri- 
son. Perfectionism, in the strict spiritual sense of 
the term, appears to have been in Garrison's case a 
passing phase ; to his biographers, at least, the dis- 
covery that he had been a Perfectionist and a dis- 
ciple of Noyes was new. But Non-Resistance, or, as 
opponents called it, No-Government, took a stronger 
hold. It took a hold so strong that Garrison even 
renounced active citizenship and made himself, as it 
were, a political eunuch for the Kingdom of Heav- 
en's sake. His language implies that the constable 
and sheriff, the judge and law-giver, were to be 
swept away; that to talk of punishing the evil and 
protecting the weak by courts of justice is at vari- 
ance with Christianity ; and that we cannot, if we 
are true to our religion, sue any man at law, to 
compel him by force to restore anything which he 
may have wrongly taken from us or others, but if 
he has seized our coat, we ought to surrender up 
our cloak, rather than subject the man to punish- 
ment. "As to the governments of this world ," he 
says, "whatever their titles or forms, we shall en- 
deavor to prove that, in their essential elements, 
as at present administered, they are all anti-Christ; 

(116) 



that they can never by human wisdom be l)rought 
into conformity with the will of God ; that they can- 
not be maintained except by naval and military 
power ; that all their penal enactments, being a dead 
letter without an army to carry them into effect, 
are virtually written in human blood ; and that the 
followers of Jesus should instinctively shun their 
stations of honor, power, and emolument — at the 
same time 'submitting to every ordinance of man, 
for the Lord's sake, ' and offering no physical resist- 
ance to any of their mandates, however unjust or 
tyrannical. " On resuming the Liberator as his own 
organ, he began to introduce in it his Perfectionism 
and Non-Resistance, to the natural dismay of such 
of his friends as were singly devoted to Abolition. 
In vain did they press upon him that his doctrines, 
carried out to their logical extreme, would dissolve 
the family and society, prevent a father from re- 
straining his children, and forbid the Liberator him- 
self, when he was attacked by a mob, to accept the 
protection of the j)olice. In vain was it argued that 
the abolition of Slavery itself, if it was to be effect- 
ed by legislation, w^ould involve the action of an 
earthly government. To Non-Resistance he clung 
with all the tenacity of his character, and placed in 
jeopardy his great mission to organize a movement 
for the dissemination of the doctrine. A natural 

revulsion followed, even among the friends of the 

(117) 



Anti-Slavery cause in England, to some of whom 
Garrison's name became a terror. In reviewing 
such an episode, we must bear in mind that the 
wisdom of this world is not the note of a moral cru- 
sader. The temperament of a Savanarola or a Gar- 
rison is pretty sure to be such as w411 expose him to 
delusion. Savanarola's temperament exposed him 
to hallucination. Garrison's fancies about Non- 
Resistance and No-Government led him rather into 
logical than into jDractical aberrations. He was 
constrained to condemn the Abolitionist Lovejoy for 
defending himself against the Pro-slavery mob by 
which he was slain. He had to parry the charge 
of theoretical anarchy by protesting that he was 
no anarch, since he believed in the Government of 
God. But he did nothing anarchic or insane ; he 
practised the passive obedience which, as we have 
seen, he preached ; and he went straight on his path 
as a crusader against slavery. He had a sort of 
saving clause in his No-Government creed, since he 
held that human governments " are the results of 
human disobedience to the requirements of heaven 
and they are better than anarchy ; just as a hail- 
storm is preferable to an earthquake, or the small- 
pox to the Asiatic cholera." He could quietly bear 
the hail-storm and put up with the small-pox. The 
moral force which he had created and which he sus- 
tained continued to act on the voters, though he 

(118) 



henceforth himself refused to vote. Noyes' slip- 
pery theories about the relations of the sexes, oscil- 
lating between chimerical asceticism and license, 
could take no hold on the mind of an excellent hus- 
band and father, though calumny did not fail to 
connect them with Garrison's name.* 

Criticism will be kind to a man who, in the midst 
of so much that was dishonest, sordid, and time-serv- 
ing, was doing his best with a single heart in every 
way for righteousness and for the good of mankind, 
strange as some of his eccentricities may have been. 
Non-Resistance and No-Government had the good 
effect of keeping its professor clearer than ever of 
political party. John Stuart Mill afterward, in a 
eulogy on Garrison, dwelt on the happy tendency 
of a great reform to draw with it other great reforms, 
evidently having in his mind what to him would 
appear the happy association of Anti-Slavery with 
Woman's Rights. Nor is even a moral crusader 
bound to be a man of one idea. Yet such a galaxy 
of heresies was sure not only to make or embitter 
enemies, but to disconcert and estrange friends. 
The first consequence was an appeal from the clergy 
against Garrison's opinions, his rebellious attitude 
toward their order, and his encouragement of fe- 

*It may be well here to remind the reader that Garrison's sons 
are in no way responsible for the opinions of the writer, though 
they have allowed him to use their woi'k as an authentic repertory 
of facts. 

(119) 



male propagandists, whose action not only jarred 
with their notions of female propriety but encroached 
on their ministerial domain. This bombshell, thrown 
from without, burst without doing much harm, 
though a desjjerate quarrel with a set of men very 
powerful and in their hearts probably inclined to 
the right, if their church trustees would have left 
them free, could do the cause no good. Far more 
serious was dissension in the Garrisonian camp it- 
self, which, by the withdrawal of support, put the 
Liberator in jDeril of its life, and afterward brought 
on open and irreconcilable schism, first in the Mas- 
sachusetts society and then in the parent society 
at New York. It would surely be unjust to tax all 
Garrison's opponents on. this occasion with clerical 
fanaticism or personal jealousy, and to brancl all 
their proceedings as conspiracy and cabal. The 
names of Arthur Tappan, Garrison's first and most 
generous protector, of his brother Lewis, of Gerrit 
Smith, who was partly at least with the dissidents, 
and of John G. Whittier, are an answer to sweeping- 
imputations. These men had good reason for de- 
siring that Abolitionism should not be compromised 
by association with No-Government, Non-Eesistance, 
anti-Sabbatarianism, opposition to capital punish- 
ment, theological heterodoxy, and the political equal- 
ity of the sexes. Garrison had a right to his own 

opinions on all subjects, and he had a right to give 

(130) 



them free expression in the Liberator when that 
journal was entirely his own and not the official or- 
gan of the party. But the question of his personal 
right was one thing, that of his eligibility as a 
leader and of his journaFs eligibility as a mouth- 
piece were another ; and on the second point there 
might well be sincere misgiving. Wilberforce would 
assuredly have forfeited the leadership of British 
Abolitionism if he had taken to preaching the doc- 
trines of Humphrey Noyes, throwing down the 
gauntlet of defiance to all the clergy, tilting against 
the Sabbath, and agitating in favor of Female 
Suffrage. Elizur Wright, whose arguments Gar- 
rison's sons, keeping the noble tradition of their 
father's candor, have faithfully set before us, put the 
case most forcibly and at the same time in the most 
friendly way. He and those who thought like him 
were entitled to respectful attention. To the charge 
of making the movement sectarian, they might have 
retorted that sects, and very narrow sects, may be 
founded on denial and destruction as well as on pos- 
itive doctrines or institutions, and that the Garri- 
sonians were giving Abolitionism the character be- 
fore the world of an anti-Biblical, anti-Clerical, anti- 
Governmental, anti-Sabbatarian and Female-Suffra- 
gist sect. On the other hand, there was much to 
be said for the policy of winking hard at Garrison's 
errors, retaining him as leader, and trying to keep 

( 121 ) 



him in the straight path. His singleness of aim, 
purity, disinterestedness, were beyond suspicion : in 
devotion to the cause and in the sacrifices which he 
had made for it he surpassed all its other champi- 
ons, and it was thoroughly identified with his name. 
Garibaldi was liable to serious aberrations, but as 
his aberrations were of the head, not of the heart, 
and he was the soul and cynosure of the movement, 
the friends of Italian independence deemed it best 
to keep him as their leader, steadying his course 
by their healthy counsels as well as they could. 
Garrison's enemies — and enemies he no doubt had 
— accused him of arrogant assumj^tion and of bear- 
ing himself as if he were the cause inca.rnate. It 
is very difficult for a man to lead without making 
it felt that he is the leader and thereby giving um- 
brage to touchy and jealous natures. But Miss 
Martineau bears witness to Garrison's remarkable 
freedom from arrogance, and even to the humility 
of his manner. In his home, she says, no one would 
have suspected that he was the great man. He cer- 
tainly never played the Moses or the Mahomet. At 
all events, it would have been well to bear with 
much, rather than incur a fatal schism. " Contest 
for Leadership " is a sinister phrase to appear 
in the history of a moral crusade, and a sound 
full of comfort to the enemy. The contest in 
this case, however, was not between Garrison and 

(122) 



a rival, but between one policy or principle and 
another. 

So far as Garrison was contending against the 
conversion of Abolition from a moral movement into 
a third political party, putting forward candidates 
for the Presidency and the offices of State, we must 
pronounce him to have been still acting in the right, 
and to have received from subsequent experience 
the strongest confirmation of his view^s. So far as 
he insisted on the doctrine of political effacement 
and the renunciation by citizens of a citizen's right 
and duty, and so far as he insisted on mixing up 
Abolition, ostensibly or practically, with No-Gov- 
ernment, Non -Resistance, anti-Sabbatarianism, anti- 
Clericalism or Woman's Rights, most people will 
hold that he was in the wrong, and that his oppo- 
nents, if they were not actuated by personal feel- 
ings or by cli(pie, had right upon their side. 

What was the exact question on which the two 
parties at last joined issue it is not easy to discern. 
In the Massachusetts society, which was the scene 
of their first encounter, the issue seems to have 
been that between "No-Government" and political 
duty. In the debate Garrison was hard pressed. 
He was called upon again and again to say defi- 
nitely whether voting was sinful, and the only an- 
swer which he would give for it was that " it was 
sinful for him." How could he think a thing sin- 

(123) 



ful for himself and not sinful for other people, the 
moral circumstances of all, in respect of the mat- 
ter in question, being identically the same? In the 
Massachusetts society the Garrisonians gained an 
easy victory. But the final battle was fought in a 
convention of the j)arent society at New York. 
To that Armageddon the Garrisonians of Massa- 
chusetts went in a steamer chartered for the pur- 
pose, buoyant from their recent triumph. Their 
buoyancy perhajDS was rather too great, considering 
that they were going to fight old friends. "There 
never," wrote Garrison, "has been such a mass of 
'ultraism ' afloat, in one boat, since the first victim 
was stolen from the fire-smitten and blood-red soil 
of Africa. There were persons of all ages, complex- 
ions, and conditions, from our time-honored and 
veteran friend Seth Sprague, through ripened man- 
hood down to rosy youth. They were, indeed, the 
moral and religious elite of New England Abolition- 
ism, who have buckled on the anti-slavery armor 
to wear to the end of the conflict, or to the close 
of life. It was truly a great and joyful meeting, 
united together by a common bond, and partaking 
of the one spirit of humanity. Such greetings and 
shaking of hands ! such interchanges of thoughts and 
opinions ! such zeal and disinterestedness and faith ! 
Verily it was good to be there!" The other party 
mustered all its forces. The issue on this occasion 

(124) 



was the Woman Question. Miss Abby Kelley was 
nominated by the Woman's Eights party as a mem- 
ber of the business committee, and her election was 
carried by a majority of about a himdred out of a 
vote of 1,008. Thus Garrison was victorious and 
retained the leadership. But the other party se- 
ceded, and the bveach never was healed. It was a 
disastrous and discreditable episode in the history 
of a moral crusade. 

(135) 



X. 

Confirmed in his leadership, Garrison appeared 
as the representative of American Abohtionism at 
the World's Convention in London (IS-tO). He 
took with him among ]iis colleagues in the dele- 
gation Lucretia Mott and other women, and he in- 
sisted on their admission to the Convention. Here 
he had to encounter a prejudice against the appear- 
ance of women on the platform, or as active partic- 
ipants in public meetings, still stronger than that 
against which he had contended in his own country. 
In those days even a man of social position and re- 
finement in England was disposed to shrink from 
the platform unless he was in public life, and the 
appearance of his wife and daughter there would 
have been shocking to him in the highest degree. 
Nor could it be denied that this feeling was inti- 
mately related to the domestic chaTacter of the race 
and the strength of its family institutions. It was 
true that this was a World's Convention, and that 
a merely local sentiment had no right to be heard. 
But this was not merely a local sentiment ; it was 
almost a universal sentiment, though it was pecul- 

(126) 



iarly strong in the country in which the Convention 
met. The object of that Convention was not to re- 
form the relations between the sexes and assert the 
right of women to mount platforms, but to set free 
the slave. Garrison had brought the women over. 
In refusing to sit in the Convention without them 
and seceding to the gallery he did right. But the 
women, if they cared more for the cause than for 
their own claims, would have done well in putting 
an end to the dilemma by peremptory withdrawal. 
In other respects the Convention went off well. 
S^Dlendid entertainments were given, one by Mrs. 
Opie, and another by the great Quaker banker, 
Samuel Gurney, who sent seven barouches to convey 
the delegates to his suburban seat. "A great sen- 
sation did we produce as we paraded through the 
streets of London." The Duchess of Sutherland 
came in all her splendor. Haydon made a picture 
of the Convention, and the Duchess bespoke a copy 
of Garrison's likeness. O'Connell contributed some 
eloquence, which it is needless to say was "blister- 
ing.'' Not less blistering was Garrison's language 
in a letter to the Quaker, Pease, in which, denounc- 
ing slave-owners, and American slave-owners above 
all, as unequalled among oppressors "in ferocious- 
ness of spirit, moral turpitude of character, and des- 
perate de^n-avity of heart," he declared that he con- 
sidered their conversion "by appeals to their under- 

( 1^'- ) 



standings, consciences, and hearts about as hopeless 
as any attempt to transform wolves and hyenas into 
lambs and doves by the same process." To read 
such invective without a shudder one must bear in 
mind that at this time negroes in the South were 
being burned alive at a slow fire. 

One of Garrison 's companions on this mission was 
C. L. Remond, a colored man. In the American 
ship Remond was compelled to go in the steer- 
age, and had to undergo the indignities of nigger- 
hood. In England he accompanied his white 
friends everywhere, sat down to table with dukes 
and duchesses, and was received with favor in every 
circle. Garrison moralizes on the difference be- 
tween the conduct of democracy and that of aris- 
tocracy ; but it is always to be borne in mind that 
in England the negro had never been branded with 
slavery. 

The reception of Garrison on his return seems to 
show the progress that his movement had been 
making. "Although," he says, "we took the 'Bos- 
tonians ' by surprise, they nevertheless rushed to the 
wharves by thousands, and gave the Acadia a grand 
reception. It was one of the most thrilling scenes 
I ever witnessed ; and as it was the termination of 
^^y voyage, t could not help weeping like a child for 
joy. Never did home before look so lovely. On 

landing, we were warmly received by a deputation 

(128) 



of our white and colored anti-slavery friends, from 
whom I received the pleasing intelligence that my 
dear wife and children were all well. These I soon 
embraced in my arms, gratefully returning thanks 
to God for all his kindness manifested to us during 
our separation. I need not attempt to describe the 
scene." The heart of Boston herself was apparently 
beginning to change. A nobler spirit seems to have 
been aroused by such outrages on law as the killing 
of Lovejoy and by the aggressions on the freedom 
of opinion. 

The schism could not fail to weaken the move- 
ment. It was immediately followed by the collapse 
of a number of local associations. Happily the 
conscience of the nation had already been effectually 
stirred, and, as Garrison said, "the mighty reaction 
was felt, and abolition was going forward with wind 
and tide." Societies — so the chronicle of his life 
tells us — were still increasing in number, even Con- 
necticut at last wheeling into line, while its legisla- 
ture repealed the law aimed against Prudence Cran- 
dalFs school, secured fugitive slaves the right to trial 
by jury, and joined in the Northern protest against 
the admission of new Slave States, and assertion of 
the right and duty of Congress to abolish slavery 
in the District of Columbia. Notwithstanding hard 
times, money had been found for the maintenance 

of a host of travelling lecturers and for the myriad 

( 139 ) 



publications of the American society. Political con- 
ventions began to ado^Dt anti-slavery resolutions. 
The clergy attended in increased numbers anti-slav- 
ery meetings. In the Methodist Church esjDecially 
there was a spread of anti-slavery sentiment which 
reactionary bishops found it difficult to keep down. 
Six out of twenty-eight Methodist Conferences and 
a thousand itinerant clergymen of the Methodist 
Church had declared for the cause. Five sixths 
of the ministers of Franklin County, Massa- 
chusetts, and a clerical convention at Worces- 
ter, pronounced against slavery and in favor of 
immediate abolition. Petitioning Congress for abo- 
lition, against extension of the area of slavery, and 
in support of the right of petitioning itself, went 
on. In despite of all errors or extravagances on the 
part of the preacher, the national conscience had 
been pricked and the call to rej)entance had been 
heard. 

Garrison continued to exercise his poetic powers, 
which, as has already been said, were not mean. 
Perhaps the best description and vindication of his 
general position are to be found in the two sonnets 
which he wrote about this time, and which are also 
fair specimens of his gift. One of the sonnets is an 
invocation to Liberty; the other was written on 
completing his thirty-fifth year: 

( 130 ) 



They tell me, Liberty ! that, in thy name, 
I may not plead for all the human race ; 
That some are born to bondage and disgrace, 

Some to a heritage of woe and shame, 

And some to power supreme, and glorious fame. 
With my whole soul I spurn the doctrine base, 
And, as an equal brotherhood, embrace 

All people, and for all fair freedom claim ! 

Know this, O man ! whate'er thy earthly fate — 
God never made a tyrant nor a slave : 

Woe, then, to those who dare to desecrate 
His glorious image ! for to all He gave 

Eternal rights, which none can violate ; 
And, by a mighty hand, the oppressed He yet shall save. 

II. 

If to the age of threescore years and ten, 

God of my life ! thou shalt my term prolong, 
Still be it mine to reprobate all wrong, 

And save from woe my suffering fellow-men. 

Whether, in Freedom's cause, my voice or pen 
Be used by Thee, who art my boast and song, 
To vindicate the weak against the strong. 

Upon my labors rest Thy benison ! 

O ! not for Afric's sons alone I plead, 
Or her descendants ; but for all who sigh 

In servile chains, whate'er their caste or creed : 
They not in vain to Heaven send up their cry; 

For all mankind from bondage shall be freed. 
And from the earth be chased all forms of tyranny. 

On his return to America we find him at the 
Chardon Street Chapel Convention, the object of 
'which was to call a meeting for the discussion of 
the Sabbath and for an inquiry into the origin, 
nature, and authority of the ministry and the church 

( 131 ) 



as now existing. Among those jjresent were some 
men of mark, such as James Russell Lowell, Theo- 
dore Parker, K. W. Emerson, and W. E. Channing. 
The anti-slavery movement may be regarded as a 
segment of a great moral movement of which, as well 
as of the theological liberalism of his day, Theodore 
Parker was perhaps the foremost apostle, unless 
Emerson deserves that palm. The Chardon Street 
Convention came to nothing, but the discussion 
which arose out of it gave Garrison an opportunity 
of once more explaining his "infidelity." 

" I am an ' infidel, ' forsooth, because I do not believe in the 
inherent holiness of the first day of the week , in a regular priest- 
hood ; in a mere flesh- and-blood corporation as constituting the 
true church of Christ ; in temple worship as a part of the new 
dispensation , in being baptized with water, and observing the 
' ordinance ' of the supper, etc. . etc. I am an ' infidel ' because 
I do believe in consecrating all time, and body, and soul unto 
God; in 'a royal priesthood, a cho.sen generation ;' in a spiritual 
church, built up of lively stones, the head of which is Christ ; 
in worshipping God in spirit and in truth, without regard to 
time or place ; in being baptized with the Holy Spirit, and en- 
joying spiritual communion with the Father, etc. If this be 
infidelity, then is Quakerism infidelity." 

Presently we have Garrison coming again to the 
rescue of Perfectionism against clerical attacks. 
But Noyes differed from him on the Woman Ques- 
tion. This difference may have had the fortunate 
effect of diminishing the sinister influence of the 
prophet. Noyes' community also failed to attract. 
We seem to hear little henceforth of Perfectionism, 

(132) 



and somewhat less even of No- Government and 
Non-Resistance. The No n- Resistant, the organ of 
the N on -Resistance Society, and the Society itself, 
presently expired. Woman's Rights continued in 
full force. 

(133) 



XI. 

The next chapter in the " Story " is " Re-forma- 
tion and Reanimation." In this, so much of the in- 
tellectual element of the party having been cut off 
by the schism, a rougher element came more to the 
front. All fervid moral movements, it is truly said, 
" unavoidably draw to themselves the insane, the un- 
balanced, the blindly enthusiastic. " After the seces- 
sion of other elements, the prominence of such ele- 
ments could not fail to be increased. " Moral plough- 
shares " the chronicle calls them, and it admits that 
their logic was severe and relentless, their discourse 
not seldom grim, and their invective sweeping. They 
were of the same stamp as the Fifth Monarchy Men 
of the English Revolution or the entliusiastic Qua- 
kers. The objects of their onslaughts were the 
churches. Garrison, we are told, in spirit was 
completely in harmony w4th them, but in details of 
language and of policy he felt at liberty to differ. 
He having moved a resolution at a meeting that 
among the responsible classes in the non-slavehold- 
ing States the religious professors, and especially 
the clergy, stand wickedly pre-eminent, one of the 

(134) 



" moral ploughshares " moved as an amendment that 
"the church and clergy of the United States as a 
whole constitute a great brotherhood of thieves." 
The clergy were not much to be blamed if they did 
not receive such hot -gospellers with open arms. 

Among his subordinate missions, Garrison was 
still an ajwstle of temperance, and he preached not 
only against drink, but against tobacco. In a trip, 
partly for lecturing, partly for pleasure, which he 
took about this time, a pleasant and lively incident 
in connection with this part of his apostleshij) 
occurred. 

"As we rode through the [Franconia] Notch after friends 
Beach and Rogers, we were alarmed at seeing smoke issue from 
their chaise-top, and cried out to them that their chaise was 
afire ! We were more than suspicious, however, that it was 
something worse than that, and that the smoke came out of 
friend Rogers' mouth. And it so turned out. This was before 
we reached the Notch tavern. Alighting there to water our 
beasts, we gave him, all round, a faithful admonition. For 
anti-slavery does not fail to spend its intervals of public service 
in mutual and searching correction of the faults of its friends. 
We gave it soundly to friend Rogers — that he, an abolitionist, 
on his way to an anti-slavery convention, should desecrate his 
anti- slavery mouth and that glorious Mountain Notch with a 
stupefying tobacco weed. We had halted at the Iron Works 
tavern to refresh our horses, and, while thej- were eating, walked 
to view the furnace. As we crossed the little bridge, friend 
Rogers took out anotlier cigar, as if to light it when we should 
reach the fire. 'Is it any malady you have got, Brother Rogers, ' 
said we to him, 'that you smoke that thing, or is it habit 
and indulgence merely?' 'It is nothing but habit,' said he 
gravely, ' or, I would say, it uxis nothing else, ' and he signifi- 
cantlj^ cast the little roll over the railing into the Ammonoosuck. 
' A revolution !' exclaimed Garrison, 'a glorious revolution, with- 

( 1^'» ) 



out noise or smohe /' and he swung his hat cheerily about his 
head. 

"It was a pretty incident, and we joyfully witnessed it and 
as joyfully record it. It was a vice ahandoned, a self-indul- 
gence denied, and from principle. It was quietly and beauti- 
fullj'^ done. We call on any smoking abolitionist to take notice 
and to take pattern. Anti-slavery wants her mouths for other 
uses than to be flues for besotting tobacco -smoke. They may as 
well almost be rum-ducts as tobacco-funnels. And we rejoice 
that HO few mouths or noses in our ranks are thus profaned. 
Abolitionists are generally as crazy in regard to rum and tobac- 
co as in regard to slavery. Some of them refrain from eating- 
flesh and drinking tea and coffee. Some are so bewildered that 
they won't fight in the way of Christian retaliation, to the great 
distui'bance of the churches they belong to, and the annoyance 
of their pastors. They do not embrace these 'new-fangled no- 
tions, as abolitionists — but, then, one fanaticism leads to another, 
and they are getting to be mono-maniacs, as the Reverend 
Brother Punchard called us, on every subject. " 

The moral atmosphere, though a good deal puri- 
fied by the abolition movement, was still foul, and 
quenched lights, even bright lights, brought into 
it from without. There came from Ireland an ap- 
peal against slavery, addressed to the Irish of the 
United States, and signed by sixty thousand Irish- 
men, with O'Connell at their head. The meeting 
at Faneuil Hall, at which this address was unrolled, 
was said by Garrison to have been indescribably en- 
thusiastic and to have made a deep impression on 
the public mind. On the mind of the Irish in Amer- 
ica it made none. The Irishman was not disposed 
to have his foot taken from the neck of the negro, 
the one being on whom he could look down. Nor 
was he disposed to forfeit the political plunder which 

(136) 



came to him as the henchman of the Democratic 
l^arty, now the party of slavery and the South. The 
Irish Bishop Hughes, the apologist of slavery, ques- 
tioned the authenticity of the document. The Irish 
mob of Philadelphia responded to it by a murderous 
riot, the precursor of the draft riot in New York, 
and by the burning of a benevolent society's hall. 
The slave-owners played up to the hand of their allies 
in the North, and at the same time gratified their 
hatred of England, as the great anti-slavery power, 
by espousing the cause of Irish liberty. Nor did 
Garrison himself shrink from winning Irish support 
by declaring for the Repeal of the Union. Father 
Mathew, the Irish aj^ostle of Temperance, after- 
ward visited the United States, and was received 
with enthusiasm by his compatriots. He had signed 
the appeal against slavery, and the Garrisonians 
fondly hoped that this time a Daniel was come to 
judgment. Their hopes were dashed when he af- 
fected scarcely to remember that he had signed the 
appeal, and plainly shoAved that he would gladly 
repudiate his signature. Extracts from O'Connell's 
anti-slavery speeches were thrust before him by 
the Liberator in vain. He not only would have 
nothing to do with abolition or abolitionists, but he 
made himself scandalously agreeable to the other 
side. All that Garrison could do with him was to 
present him in a very sorry aspect before the world, 

(187) 



and press home the moral lesson of his apostasy. 
This was effectually done. A similar disappoint- 
ment awaited the abolitionists when Kossuth visited 
the United States. Him also, as a champion of 
liberty, they exjDected to avow his sympathy with 
the liberators of the slave. He avowed, on the con- 
trary, his sympathy with Southern autonomy and 
the right of every people to regulate its own affairs 
and institutions. The abolitionists were not aware 
that the liberty of which Kossuth himself was the 
champion was that of a dominant race, and that 
there would be a certain filament of sympathy be- 
tween the Southern w^hite who wished to do as he 
liked with his own negro, and the Mag}'ar who 
wished to do as he liked with his own Croat, 

The agents sent out by the Fi-ee Church of Scot- 
land, after its secession from the State Church, to 
the United States, to seek assistance in America, 
lapsed even more sadly than Father Mathew and 
Kossuth. They took money from Presbyterian 
slave-owners. To stop this scandal, Garrison a third 
time crossed the Atlantic. He was successful in his 
mission, though the churches rang in vain with the 
cry, "Send back the money!'' He met personally 
with a reception which showed that his name was 
still great with the British friends of his cause. 
His principal speech is as good a specimen as could 
be given of his oratory, and it shows, by its adapta- 

( 138 ) 



tion to hearers who were fighting for tlie hberation 
of the Church from the State, that the speaker could 
on occasion display tact as well as power. The 
speech is given as reported in the London Universe 
of August 28, 184:6. 

" He was received with enthusiastic cheering, hundreds rising 
from their seats. He wished to know if they were in eanest 
when they gave him that reception? Were they disposed to re 
gard him as the friend of universal liberty? Then he begged to 
tell them that if they went over to America they would be 
deemed fit subjects for Lynch law. (Laughter and cheers. ) 
What ! were they in earnest? Were there no ajiologists for 
slavery there? None to applaud those ancient slave-holding 
patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? None to talk of sending 
Onesimus back to his master because he was a slave? Were 
tliere none to apologize for those pious men wlio plundered 
cradles of babes, tortured women by the slave-driver's lash, and 
sent men to the auction-block? ' Wliy, then, ' said Mr. Garrison, 
'here's my hand for every one of you, and here's a heart that 
beats in unison with your own. ' (Great cheering. ) . . . 

"'It is no common conflict in which we are engaged, because 
whatever forms of political oppression you maj" have here, or 
in Europe, or in the world besides, there is no power so dread- 
ful and exterminating as American slavery. It began with the 
very beginning of the Union (hear!), and it has grown with 
our growth until it now holds complete mastery 'over the whole 
country, so that the two great political parties are eager to do 
its bidding, and religious sects bow before it and do it homage ; 
in one word, it has completely subjected Church and State be- 
cause they are on the side of slavery, and they shall go down 
together. (Great applause.) It is said that the abolitionists are 
assailing the American Church ; it is true. It is said they ai-e 
assailing the American clergy in [as] a body ; it is true. It is 
said they are assailing the Government under which they live ; 
it is true. It is said thej^ are seeking the dissolution of the 
Union ; it is true. Why do I say this? Because the Church is 
the stronghold of the system , because the Government was orig- 
inally so constructed that it gives its entire support to slaverj', 
so long as the slave-holder shall desire it. 

(139) 



"'Now, to come to facts, and to show jou that I do uot exag- 
gerate in what I state, I will read for you a few extracts, giv- 
ing you the very words of the abettors of slavery in the 
Church. . . . 

"'Such is slavery in America! And j^et the abolitionists are 
stigmatized as infidels because they would have no such Chris- 
tianity or republicanism as sanctioned such atrocities. Slavery 
is a curse wherever it is found. It not only smites with barren- 
ness the most fertile soil in the world, but it makes human life 
cheap, and, in fact, of no value at all. (Cheers.) A j'ear ago 
T thought I would collect fi'om the newsj^apers all the horrible 
details of killing, maiming, etc., connected with slavery, and 
put them in my paper. My collection was imperfect, for I had 
no Southern papers, for they will not send papers to me from 
the South. I took the Northern papers, and took out of them 
the most bloody deeds. They are very few indeed, but they 
show the state of society there, and a state of insecurity for 
human life such as can nowhere else be found. The list was 
begun a year ago, and thi§ paper is full of short paragraphs. 
[Here INIr. Garrison unrolled a paper, the width of one of our 
columns, made up of short accounts of murders, etc., and un- 
rolled it from end to end. It was about twelve yards long. 
There were calls for a few to be read. Mr. Garrison then read 
two or three, and then continued.] And yet there are those 
who attempt to excuse this state of things. I am sorry that 
there are Englishmen disposed to apologize for these American 
Christians who keep bloodhounds ! They say they are under a 
great mistake — they are in error, but you must call such Chris- 
tians no hard or bad names. But I say the American people are 
excluded from apology. They hold the Declaration in their hand 
that all men are equal ; then they enslave their brother, and 
whip him, and hunt him with bloodhounds, and profess the gos- 
pel of Christ. Now, no man can be excused for enslaving an- 
other, whether he be savage or civilized. (Great applause.) 
God has put a witness in every man's breast wiiich protests 
against man holding a man in bondage. 1 never debate the 
question as to whether man may hold property in man. I never 
degrade myself by debating the question, "Is slavery a sin?" It 
is a self-evident truth, which God hath engraven on our very 
nature. Where I see the holder of a slave, I charge the sin 
upon him, and I denounce him. . . . 

"'Now, what have we American abolitionists a right to ask 
(140) 



of J- oil Englishmen? You oviglit not to receive slave- holders as 
honest Christian men. You ought not to invite them to your 
pulpits, to your commimion-tables. Will you see to it that they 
never ascend your pulpits? If you will, then the slave will 
bless you, and thanks from the American abolitionists will come 
over in thunder tones for j'our decision, and you will give a 
blow to slavery from which it will not recover. We ask another 
thing of you. Send us no more delegates to the States, or if j'ou 
do, let there be no divinity among them. Nothing but common 
humanity can stand in the United States. (Cheers.) Send us 
no more Baptist clerical delegates, or Methodist or Presbyterian 
or Quaker clerical delegates. They have all played into the hands 

of slavery against the abolitionists. (Cheers.) From Dr. C , 

down to the last delegation, they have all done an evil work, 
and have strengthened slavery against us. Like the priest and 
the Levite, thej- have passed us by and gone on the other side. 
They found the cause of abolitionism unpopular. The mass of 
society were pro-slavery, so they went with them, and we have 
gone to the wall. Send us no more, if you please. (Cheers. ) 
W^e have had to say, Save us from our English friends, and we 
will take care of our enemies. There have been those who have 
gone over to America, and who have nobly stood their ground. 
They have passed through the fire, and no smell of it has been 
found on them. That man (pointing to the chairman, Mr. 
Thompson) has gone through it. (Immense cheering, continued 
for some time.) Though rising on the topmost wave of popular- 
ity at home, he consented to aid us, where he was sin-e to be 
mobbed and scouted But he never blanched. He was not 
afraid to make himself the friend and companion of the negro ; 
and if he had remained, his life would have been taken. If we 
had desired it, he would have remained and hazarded his life ; 
but we said, Go ! Now, I don't know if had he been divine he 
could have stood it. While a man remains common human- 
ity, I can trust him ; but when he gets up into the air, where 
there comes something superhuman about him, I am afraid of 
him. (Cheers.) 

"'Another thing don't do. Send no more men to the South to 
get money. The Free Church of Scotland is, like democratic 
America, stained with blood. It has the price of blood in its 
treasury. Oh! that Free Church of Scotland! I am for free 
dom everywhere, and rejoice that that Church is a free one ; but 
it has received a jxiltry bribe, and abetted slavery. I have no 

( 141 ) 



idea they will send back the money. The laity I believe would 
send it back, but the divinity prevents it.'" 

In the mean time, as the leader of American abo- 
htionism, Garrison had been taking a bold step for- 
ward. He had declared for the dissolution of the 
Union. Political iconoclasm could no farther go. 
The Union was the idol to which the nation, even 
that part of the nation of which mammon was not 
the god, had blindly bowed down and been willing 
to sacrifice its morality. In the Union the people 
saw the source of incalculable blessings and the 
pledge of American greatness. The fiat of nature 
seemed herein to conspire with the dictates of policy 
and pride ; for the MississijDpi, then more important 
than it has been since the introduction of railways, 
appeared physically to bind the whole frame to- 
gether. The sentiment had been ardently propa- 
gated by Clay and the men of the West, an offspring 
of the collective nation to which the old divisions 
between Federalism and anti-Federalism were un- 
known. It had beenintensifiedby the Warof 1812. 
It had been fixed and glorified by Webster's great 
speech against Hayne. The people had been trained 
even to believe that the sacred compact demanded 
unquestioning observance, and their moral percep- 
tions on the subject of slavery had been confused 
by that belief. They fancied that, being bound by 
their covenant, they were no more morally free 

( 1-13 ) 



agents, and that therefore they were acquitted of 
sin. To speak against the Union was flat blas- 
phemy; and of this blasphemy Garrison and his 
cii'cle were now guilty in the highest degree. 

Of the political abolitionists, some persuaded them- 
selves that slavery was not in the Constitution ; 
others admitted that it was in the Constitution, but 
thought it possible that the Constitution might be 
amended ; others, again, like Gerrit Smith, with a 
venial inconsistency, took both lines at once. Gar- 
rison was under no delusion on either point. He 
saw that though the actual words "slaves" and 
"slave-owners " might not be found in the Constitu- 
tion, "other words were used intelligently and 
specifically to meet the necessities of slavery," and 
that the agreement had been se.aled with a full knowl- 
edge of the import of those words and in good faith 
on both sides. The extension of the slave-trade 
for -twenty years, the provision giving political se- 
curity to the slave-owner's property by assigning 
him votes for his slaves, and the enactment of a fu- 
gitive-slave law were practical comments too clear to 
leave any doubt in an honest mind. Garrison knew, 
also, that Jefferson bad proposed to introduce into 
the Declaration of Independence a clause branding, 
though most unjustly, George III. as the author of 
the slave-trade, but had been compelled by the slave- 
owners to withdraw it. If the name of slavery had 

( 143 ) 



been avoided by the framers of the Constitution 
while they recognized and perpetuated the thing, 
this proved not their innocence, but their conscious- 
ness of guilt. False interpretation of a document 
in the interest of freedom seemed to Garrison neither 
moral nor strong. As little was he inclined to a 
patriotic falsification of history. " The truth is," he 
said, "our fathers were intent on securing libert}^ 
to themselves, without being very scrupulous as to 
the means they used to accomplish their purpose. 
They were not actuated by the sjjirit of universal 
philanthropy ; and though in words they recognized 
occasionally the brotherhood of the human race, in 
practice they continually denied it. They did not 
blush to enslave a portion of their fellow-men, and 
to buy and sell them as cattle in the market, while 
they were fighting against the oppression of the 
mother-country, and boasting of their regard for 
the rights of men. Why, then, concede to them 
virtues which they did not possess?" Patrick Henry, 
the Brutus of the Revolution, was all his life noted 
for his sharpness as a slave-trader. The slave- 
owner, in appealing to the Constitution, had the 
facts undeniably on his side ; and the same compact 
which expressly gave him slavery, gave him also 
by implication a right to the necessary safeguards 
of slavery, such as a fugitive-slave law to be execut- 
ed in good faith by the North, and the aid of fed- 

( 144 ) 



eral arms, if necessary, in suppressing slave insur- 
rection. Chief Justice Taney was vile ; bat he was 
not far from speaking the truth when he pronounced 
that, in the view of the f ramers of the Constitution, 
the black man had no rights which the white man 
was bound to respect. The Constitution, said Gar- 
rison, meant " precisely what those who framed and 
adopted it meant." No violent construction of it 
could be admitted against the washes of either of 
the parties to the bargain. No just or honest use 
of it could be made, in oj)position to the plain inten- 
tion of its framers, "except to declare the contract 
at an end and to refuse to serve under it." 

Hope either of amending the Constitution with 
the consent of the slave-owner, or of amending it 
against his will yet without disruption, could seri- 
ously be entertained by no man who considered the 
temper of the slave-owners, the relative forces of the 
two political elements, or the history of the Missouri 
Compromise^ and of all that had since occurred. 
Compromise, recognizing slavery, and seeking to 
put territorial limits to it, was the highest mark of 
political aspiration. Finally to put territorial limits 
to a power full of grow^th and ambition was scarcely 
possible, as the annexation of Texas proved. But 
while the Union lasted, nothing could prevent slav- 
ery from pervading, morall}' and socially, the w^hole 

Republic. Nothing could dissever the responsibility. 

(145) 



Nothing could save the North from the obHgation 
to lend its force, in case of necessity, for the sup- 
pression of slave insurrection. Nothing could re- 
lieve it from the satanic duty of slave-catching. 
The legislative obstacles which anti-slavery senti- 
ment at the North put in the way of extradition, 
and the escape of negroes to Canada which it facili- 
tated, were breaches, though it might be glorious 
breaches, of good faith toward the Southern part- 
ner in the compact. Politicians like Clay and Web- 
ster were completely blinded to the future by their 
worship of the Union. Politicians like Seward, 
who said that there was an irrepressible conflict, 
and Lincoln, who said that the Union must in the 
end be all slave or all free, had an inkling of the 
fatal truth. But if the conflict was irrepressible, 
what form was it to take ? That of a constitutional 
struggle, or that of violence? If the Union was 
destined to be all slave or all free, how was the 
question which of the two it should be to- be decided ? 
Neither Seward nor Lincoln dared to say or per- 
haps even to conjecture. But if either of them had 
raised the veil of the future he would certainly have 
seen behind it the grim visage of civil war. The 
plan of buying out slavery being, for reasons al- 
ready mentioned, hopeless, and in fact having hardly 
a serious adherent, the only way of abolishing slav- 
ery or ridding the North of resiwnsibility for it 

(146) 



without dissolving the Union was civil war. The 
only way of ridding the North of slavery and at the 
same time escaping civil war v/as that which Gar- 
rison now propounded, the dissolution of the Union. 
In no uncertain language did he propound it. All 
ears must have tingled when they heard the divine 
work of the Revolutionary Fathers denounced as " a 
covenant with death and an agreement with hell." 
No wonder if audiences hissed and the press thun- 
dered when Longfellow's ode to the Union was 
dubbed " a eulogy dripping with the blood of em- 
bruted humanity," and to the poet's image of a ship 
of state was opposed that of a sliij^ "■rotting through 
all her timbers, leaking from stem to stern, laboring 
heavily on a storm -tossed sea, surrounded by clouds 
of disastrous jjortent," navigated by pirates, and 
destined to go down amid the exultation of all who 
were yearning for the deliverance of a groaning 
world. " No Union with slave-holders " was hence- 
forth the watchword of the Liberator. South Caro- 
lina shouted back, ' ' No Union with free labor ! ' ' Both 
were in the right; and in compliance with their 
united demand lay the only chance of escaping the 
war which Garrison was unjustly charged with 
having kindled. 

The weak point in Garrison's policy was that his 
No-Government theory had left him without a mo- 
tor. How but through the agency of Government 

( 14T ) 



was the Union to be dissolved? How but by going 
to the polls could the Government be set in motion ? 
His new programme set forth that his aim was " to 
persuade Northern voters that the strongest politi- 
cal influence which they can wield for the overthrow 
of slavery is to cease sustaining the existing com- 
pact, by withdrawing from the polls, and calmly 
waiting for the time when a righteous government 
shall supersede the institutions of tyranny," But 
was that change to be wrought by miracle? And 
how, according to the Perfectionist theory, could 
any human government be righteous? Here again, 
however, it was not the political or the anti-political 
theory, but the appeal to the public conscience, 
which really told. The annexation of Texas came 
to disabuse the people of their fond belief in a quiet 
and limited Slave Power. To those who regarded 
the new motto as calculated to impair the character 
and influence of the Society, the Liberator replied 
that "the Society had never had any character ex- 
cept for fanaticism, and never would have any till 
the trumpet of jubilee sounded through the land, 
and that its influence had been just in proportion to 
its faith in God, its fidelity to its principles, and its 
readiness to be without reputation." For the pres- 
ent he anticipated fresh contumely and derision. It 
can hardly be said that hisanticipation was fulfilled. 
Outbursts of wrath, of course, there were, and were 

(148) 



sure to be when the Convention of the Anti-Slavery 
Society presented a banner to its president, bearing 
on it the satirical device of the national eagle with 
one foot on the Constitution and the other on a 
prostrate slave. Yet disunionist banners multiplied, 
and disunion sentiment spread not only among the 
Old School or moral party of Abolitionists, but 
beyond. 

But tlie Union having been dissolved, what was 
to become of the negroes? Were they to be left to 
the mercy of the slave-owner? To this question the 
mind of the Liberator seems not to have been prac- 
tically turned. He protested, it is true, in gen- 
eral words, that he had no intention of abandoning 
his client. But the specific mode in which the res- 
cue of the client was to be effected does not appear. 
"My reliance," he says, "for the deliverance of the 
oppressed universally, is upon the nature of man, 
the inherent wrongfulness of oppression, the power 
of truth, and the omnipotence of God." But he 
had said before that the slave-owner was beyond the 
pale of moral influence, and that you might as well 
try to change the nature of a beast of prey. The 
oftener we review the question the more certain it 
seems that in the absence of any superior power, 
such as has been exercised by the Czar in the abo- 
lition of Eussian serfage, or by the Imperial Parlia- 
ment in the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, 

(149) 



the inevitable end was either the triumph of slavery 
or civil war. The year 1845 saw the apparent 
triumph of slavery, which, having achieved the 
annexation of Texas, had put the politicians, and 
seemed to have put the nation, under its feet. The 
year 1847 saw Garrison carrying the torch of con- 
science into dark places of the West on the invita- 
tion of the Abolitionists of Ohio. He was accom- 
panied by Frederick Douglass, whose eloquence 
might be cited as a proof of the capacities of his 
race had he been a pure negro ; but he was a half- 
caste. The negro race, both in its native land and 
in the lands to which it has been transported by the 
slave-ship, has been placed under such disadvantages 
that no fair inference as to its capacity can be drawn 
from what it has yet done or jDroduced. But Tous- 
saint L'Ouverture, it is believed, is the only pure 
negro who has yet risen to anything like eminence; 
and Toussaint, though a perfect negro, seems to 
have been of a peculiar and princely family. Mixed, 
however, as the race of Frederick Douglass was, 
and manifest as was his relation to the white race, 
this did not save him from contumely, even in a 
free State. When seated in the cars he was ordered 
by a man, who had a lady v»ath him, in a slave- 
driving tone, to get out of that seat. He quietly 
replied that he would readily give up the seat if he 
were requested in a civil manner. The white man 

(150) 



thereupon laid violent hands upon him, dragged 
him out, and, when Douglass protested, told him 
he would knock his teeth down his throat. At 
Harrisburg, the mob having been told that a "nig- 
ger " was to lecture, came provided with brickbats, 
rotten eggs, and fire-crackers, of which they made a 
liberal use. Douglass was not allowed to sit down 
at the eating tables, and for two days hardly tasted 
food. Garrison contrasts this with the splendid re- 
ception given the same man in all parts of Great 
Britain. Nothing, perhaps, has ever equalled the 
intensity of caste feelings generated by the brand of 
slavery, combined with the difference of color and 
the physical antipathy, in the United States. Nor 
was the keenness of the American in discovering the 
slightest trace of negro blood where no stranger 
would have suspected its existence less remarkable 
than his abhorrence of it when discovered. Garri- 
son's defiance of the feeling by open and persistent 
intercourse with the blacks was proof of a moral 
heroism to which, since caste has been mitigated by 
the abolition of slavery, we can hardly do full jus- 
tice. Heretic though he might be, no man ever 
bore witness more -bravely or with greater self-sac- 
rifice to the brotherhood of man, which is the social 
foundation of Christianity. 

The receptions given to the Abolitionists varied 
at different places. The clergy. Garrison says, were 

(151) 



hostile, and his feeling against the clergy grew 
stronger than ever. Sometimes a place for his 
meetings could hardly be found ; but at other places 
the common people heard him gladly, and the con- 
course was immense. At New Lyme, in Ohio, " when 
the dense mass moved off in their long array of ve- 
hicles, dispersing in every direction to their several 
homes, some a distance of ten, others of twenty, 
others of eighty, miles, it was a wonderful sj^ectacle. " 
A colored man rode three hundred miles to the 
meeting. The speaker might feel confident as he 
looked at the receding crowd that whatever the 
mood of the politicians or the magnates of com- 
merce might be, the conscience of the people had 
been touched; and where the people was master, 
victory in the end was sure. 

The Liberator, however, had not seen the last of 
mobs. In 1850, at the time when Webster's apos- 
tasy had put fresh heart into the party of slavery at 
the North, and the excitement on the subject had 
been kindled anew, he went to preside at the annual 
meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society at New York. 
He was received by the "satanic" forces not only 
with vituperation, but with menace, to which he suc- 
cumbed only so far as to belie the pictures of cari- 
caturists by exchanging the turn-down collar to 
which he had clung for the stand-up collar of the 
day. In his speech he dwelt on the inconsistency 

(152) 



between the profession of the Christian churches 
and their practice, contrasting the importance at- 
tached to the behef in Jesus with the feeble effect 
of that behef on character and conduct. First of 
all he arraigned the Eoman Catholic Church for 
allowing her priests and members to hold slaves. 
This called up Captain Rynders, a self-made man, 
who, from being a professed gambler in the South- 
west, had risen to local political leadership under the 
auspices of Tammany, without merging the bravo in 
the politician, and posed as a defender of the Union 
against traitors and of Christian society against 
infidels. Captain Rynders interpolated a question 
whether there were no other churches besides the 
Catholic Church whose clergy and members held 
slaves. On this point he received prompt and full 
satisfaction. "Shall we look," Garrison went on to 
say, "to the Episcopal Church for hope? It was the 
boast of John C. Calhoun, shortly before his death, 
that that church was impregnable to anti-slavery. 
That vaunt was founded on truth, for the Episcopal 
clergy and laity are buyers and sellers of human 
flesh. We cannot, therefore, look to them. Shall 
we look to the Presbyterian Church? The whole 
weight of it is on the side of oppression. Ministers 
and people buy and sell slaves, apparently without 
any compunctious visitings of conscience. We can- 
not, therefore, look to them, nor to the Baptists, nor 

( 153 ) 



the Methodists, for they, too, are against the slave, 
and all the sects are combined to prevent that ju- 
bilee which it is the will of God should come. . . . 
Be not startled when I say that a belief in Jesus is 
no evidence of goodness (hisses) ; no, friends." 

Voice — "Yes, it is!" 

Mr. Garrisox — "Our friend says 'yes;' my po- 
sition is 'no.' It is worthless as a test, for the rea- 
son I have already assigned in reference to the other 
tests. His praises are sung in Louisiana, Alabama, 
and the other Southern States just as well as in 
Massachusetts. 

Captain Eynders — "Are you aware that the 
slaves in the South have their prayer-meetings in 
honor of Christ? 

Mr. Garrison — " Not a slave-holding or a slave- 
breeding Jesus I (Sensation.) The slaves believe in 
a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country 
Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is 
no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Ju- 
dea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may safely 
be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person 
in the United States. (Great sensation, and mur- 
murs of disapprobation.) Jesus sits in the Presi- 
dent's chair of the United States. (A thrill of hor- 
ror here seemed to run through the assembly.) 
Zachary Taylor sits there, which is the same thing, 
for he believes in Jesus. He believes in war and 

(154) 



the Jesus that 'gave the Mexicans hell." " (^Sensa- 
tion, uproar, and confusion.) 

ThenameofZachary Taylor aroused the politician 
in the soul of Captain Rynders, who at once charged 
home. Followed by his crew, shouting and swear- 
ing, he rushed from the gallery to the speaker's 
desk, and with clinched fist defied Garrison to say 
anything against the President of the United States-. 
Garrison disclaimed any such intention, and his 
disclaimer was enforced by Mr. Thomas Kane, a 
young follower, who, not having subscribed the doc- 
trine of Non-Resistance, declared that not a hair of 
his leader's head should be harmed, and shook his 
fist in the captain's face. Afterward spoke a 
henchman of Rynders, who maintained that the 
blacks were not men, but of the monkey tribe. He 
was confronted by Frederick Douglass, saying, "I 
cannot follow the gentleman who has just spoken 
in his argument. I will assist him in it, how- 
ever. I offer myself for 3'our examination. Am 
I a man?" "You," ejaculated Captain Rynders, 
"are not a black man, you are only half a nigger I" 
"Then," replied Douglass, "I am half-brother to 
Captain Rynders." At the last session the meeting 
was broken up by the mob, which carried a resolu- 
tion, moved, we are told, by an ex-policeman of 
the Eighth Ward who had been "broken " for being 

found drunk in a house of ill-fame. 

( i->') ) 



"Resolved, That this meetmg does not see suf- 
ficient reasons for interfering with the domestic in- 
stitutions of the South, even if it were constitutional 
— which it is not — and therefore will not counte- 
nance fanatical agitation whose aims and ends are 
the overthrow of the churches, a reign of anarchy, 
a division of interests, the supremacy of a hypocrit- 
ical atheism, a general amalgamation, and a disso- 
lution of the Union. For these reasons, this meet- 
ing recommends to these humanity -mongers the 
confining of its [sic] investigations to the progress 
of degradation among the negroes of the North, and 
the increasing inequality and poverty of the free 
whites and blacks of New York and similar places, 
instead of scurrility, blasphemy, and vituperation." 

It was at this time that, under the terrors of the 
new Fugitive-slave law, which passed at the dicta- 
tion of the South and swept away all securities for 
justice, six thousand black Christians, a larger num- 
ber than that of the Puritan exiles, were driven 
from their homes in the Northern States to a refuge 
on British soil. The free spirit of the people in 
the North was deeply stirred, and it was in vain 
that the chiefs of commerce and society held great 
public meetings to keep it down. When the fugi- 
tive slave, Anthony Burns, after an attempt to 
rescue him, was marched through the streets of 
Boston with all the pomp of military escort to be 

(156) 



restored to his master in Virginia, flags were hung 
out at half-mast or draped in mourning. The clergy 
at last were moved, though some of their leaders 
still came forward to preach the moral and religious 
duty of upholding the Union by imj^licit submission 
to the law. The law in truth was clear — not clearer, 
however, than had been the legal right of the Im- 
perial Parliament of Great Britain to tax the Colo- 
nies when Boston rose in rebellion and threw the 
tea of British merchants into the water. 

The next episode in Garrison's life was pleasant. 
George Thompson, now an M.P., ventured over 
again from England, a sign in itself that, whatever 
might be the backslidings of politicians. Abolition 
as a moral cause had gained ground among the peo- 
ple. He was charged to present a testimonial to 
Garrison, in the shape of a gold watch, commemo- 
rating the twenty years of the Liberator's life. In 
acknowledgment. Garrison said : 

"Mr. President, if this were a rotten egg [holding up the 
watch] or a brickbat, I should know how to receive it. (Laugh- 
ter and cheers. ) If tliese cheers were the yells of a frantic mob 
seeking my life, I should know precisely how to behave. But 
the presentation of tliis valuable gift is as unexpected by me as 
would be the falliug of the stars from the heavens ; and I feel 
indescribably small before you in accepting it. A gold watch ! 
Why, I have been compensated in this cause a million times 
over ! In tlie darkest hour, in the greatest peril, I have felt just 
at that moment that it was everything to be in such a cause. I 
know tliat the jiraises which have fallen from the lips of my be- 
loved brother and faithful coadjuotr have been spoken in all sin- 
cerity , otherwise they would be intolerable. I know that I am 

( b^T ) 



among those not accustomed to flatter, and who do not mean to 
flatter. I know how to appreciate such demonstrations as greet 
me here to night. Had it not been for such as are here assem- 
bled, we should not have had an Anti-Slavery struggle. I am 
sorry, my friends, that I have not a gold watch to present to 
each one of you. (Laughter. ) You all deserve one. " 

At his interview with Miss Martineau, Garrison 
had seemed embarrassed, and had thanked her for 
wishing to see one so odious as himself, in a man- 
ner which she thought overstrained. She after- 
ward remarked to the friend who had brought them 
together that there appeared to her to be a want of 
manliness in Garrison's agitation. The friend re- 
plied that she '^ could not know what it was to be 
tlie object of insult and hatred to the whole of so- 
ciety for a series of years ; that Garrison could bear 
what he met with from street to street, and from 
town to town ; but that a kind look and shake of 
the hand from a stranger unmanned him for the 
moment." A shock in itself is disagreeable, and 
it is not unlikely that a man long attempered to un- 
popularity as his element would at first feel a shock 
on being addressed in the unwonted language of 
sympathy and praise. Having grown familiar with 
rotten eggs, he would hardly know what to do at 
first with a gold watch. 

A testimonial more significant than a thousand 
gold watches was at this time presented to the 
leader of the moral movement against slavery. 

( 158 ) 



"Uncle Tom's Cabin,"' while it owed its literary ex- 
cellence to the creative genius of Mrs.Beecher Stowe, 
was morally the offspring of the awakening which 
Garrison had done most to bring about. Its time- 
liness as a moral birth was, in part at least, the 
cause of its prodigious success. That its tangible 
effects on votes or even on public opinion were not 
so great as its circulation, we are told by Wendell 
Phillips, and we should be prepared to believe. It 
is wonderful how little anything tells on votes un- 
der the system of party government except party ; 
while as works of fiction are not taken seriously, 
people may cry or laugh ovei* a religious, political, 
or social novel and yet lay it down Avith their opin- 
ions little, and their conduct not at all, changed. 
In England not a few cried over "Uncle Tom " and 
laughed over Topsy, who afterward took the part of 
the South. But "Uncle Tom's Cabin," though it 
might not turn suffrages on the Nebraska bill, or 
call forth a monster petition for the repeal of the 
Fugitive-slave law, could not fail to melt the icy 
barrier of hatred and contempt for race. In this 
respect its writer may claim to share the Liber- 
ator's palm. Garrison spoke with ardent admira- 
tion of the tale, notwithstanding that its writer's 
views did not Vv'holly square with his own. A cor- 
respondence followed between him and Mrs. Beecher 
Stowe, in which Mrs. Stowe, when she deprecated 

( 159 ) 



needless bombardment of the Bible and the Sabbath, 
with which the religion of common people was bound 
up, while their morality was bound up with their 
religion, had a good deal of reason on her side. 
However, Garrison's "infidelity" did not prevent a 
cordial meeting. 

Meantime events were advancing to their crisis. 
In 1854: the Nebraska bill, by repudiating the 
Missouri Compromise, threw open the lists once 
more for the combat between Slavery and Freedom, 
and armed collision in the Territory soon followed. 
The South had constrained the subservient politi- 
cians of Washington to pass the new Fugitive-slave 
law. The North refused to execute it. Massa- 
chusetts answered it with the personal-liberty bill, 
whereby she hurled defiance, not only at the South, 
but at the Constitution. Garrison was filled with 
the spirit of the hour. On the 4th of July, 185-i, 
at the ojien-air celebration at Framingham, Mass., 
by the Abolitionists, he solemnly burned, amid 
loud acclamations, the Fugitive-slave law; the de- 
cision of Edward G. Loriiig, the Massachusetts offi- 
cer who, acting as a United States Commissioner, 
had sent Anthony Burns back to slavery ; the charge 
of Judge Benjamin E. Curtis to the United States 
Grand Jury in reference to the '' treasonable " assault 
upon the court-house for the rescue of the fugitive ; 
and, finally, the Constitution of the United States. 

(160) 



Holding uj) the Constitution, he denounced it as the 
parent of all the other iniquities, branded it as a 
covenant with death and an agreement with hell, 
and cast it into the flames, exclaiming, "So perish 
all compromises with tyranny ! and let all the peo- 
ple say, Amen!" A loud response from the people 
went up to heaven. As might have been expected, 
a response not less loud in a different strain went 
up elsewhere. Yet Garrison was so far accepted 
that when the motion for the removal of Loring 
from his office came on in the Massachusetts Senate, 

a seat was given him at the President's side. 

(161) 



XII. 

Very few, so far as we can tell from speeches and 
writings, seem to have foreseen, or even strongly- 
surmised, the approach of civil war. Gerrit Smith 
read the meaning of the Kansas struggle, but Sew- 
ard, the foremost of public men on the right side, 
evidently had no idea that this irrepressible conflict 
was actually at hand ; he was working for the Pres- 
idency on the opposite hypothesis. Lincoln, aj)pai'- 
ently, had just as little notion that the house could 
no longer remain divided against itself, and the 
time had come when it must be decided whether the 
Union should be all slave or all free. Garrison saw 
no farther than the rest. " Rely upon it, "he said, 
at a Disunion Convention in 1857, "there is not an 
intelligent slave-holder at the South who is for a 
dissolution of the Union. " He was firmly persuaded 
that the threat was only used to bring the North 
upon its knees. Reverting to those days now, we 
can distinctly hear the thunder-tread of advancing 
destiny and see the shadows deepening on the trou- 
l)led scene. The first act of secession, as the South 
might have plausibly contended, was the Personal - 

(162) 



liberty law of Massachusetts. The first blow was 
struck by the Southern fire-eater, Brooks, when he 
felled Sumner to the earth in the Senate House for 
a speech which, it must be owned, was as deadly a 
provocation to Southern violence as words could 
convey. But the attempt of the South to bring 
Kansas into the Union by force as a Slave State was 
actually civil war. There were Garrisonians who 
provided themselves with Sharp's rifles, for use, as 
they said, "not against men, but against beasts!" 
Garrison himself protested that if anybody ought 
to be provided with a Sharp's rifle it was the slave. 
For himself, he remained faithful to Non-Eesist- 
ance. The sequel of the conflict in Kansas was the 
raid of John Brown on Virginia, which furnislied 
the theme for the MarseiUaise of the Civil War. 
Garrison felt himself bound to designate the raid 
in the Liberator as a misguided, wild, and ap- 
l^arently insane, though disinterested and well-in- 
tended, effort of insurrection to emancipate the 
slaves in Virginia. " Our views of war and blood- 
shed," he said, "even in the best of causes, are too 
well known to need repeating here ; but let no one 
who glories in the Revolutionary struggle of 1776 
den^' the right of the slaves to imitate the example 
of our fathers." In a subsequent number he, al- 
ways with a reserve in favor of Non-Resistance, 
lauded Brown as a hero to be remembered with Wal- 

(163) 



lace and Tell, Washington and Warren ; and, judg- 
ing him by the code of Bunker Hill, the mate of 
any who ever wielded the sword for liberty. In 
the general outburst of sympathy he saw a proof 
of the marvellous change wrought by thirty years 
of moral agitation. "Ten years since, there were 
thousands who could not endure any lightest word 
of rebuke of the South ; they can now easily swal- 
low John Brown whole, and his rifle into the bar- 
gain. In firing his gun he has merely told us what 
time of day it is. It is high noon, thank God I" 
Not so thought those the paramount allegiance of 
whose hearts had always been to the Union, and 
w^ho now sent up cries of alarm on all sides, and 
waved the white flag to the South. Even Henry 
Wilson, Sumner's colleague in the Senate, deplored 
the burden laid upon the Eepublican party by ar- 
raying against it "that intense, passionate, and ve- 
hement spirit of nationality which glows in the 
bosoms of the American people." The logic of the 
head and the heart, he said, taught him to regard 
all such movements, whether in the North or in the 
South, as crimes against liberty. The banner which 
he desired them to follow was that of " liiberty and 
Union." There was even a last splutter of mob- 
violence at an anti-slavery meeting at Boston, mem- 
orable for having brought on the anti-slavery plat- 
form, in defence of freedom of speech, Emerson, 

(164) 



whose attitude toward Abolitionism had before 
been rather jihilosophic. 

Desire what Wilson and patriots of his class would, 
fate was irresistibly ranging all of them under the 
banner of Liberty but not of Union, at least not of 
Union till Liberty should have prevailed. The po- 
litical combinations, after much shifting and cross- 
ing, settled down on one side into a well-defined 
l^arty of the North, under the name of the Republi- 
can party, confronting the united South. Elements 
there still were at the North belonging to the oppo- 
site ends of society, a plutocracy at one end, a mob 
at the other, which adhered to the Southern alliance 
and its emoluments, under the title of the Demo- 
cratic party, and afterward furnished respectively 
the Copperheads of pro-slavery drawing-rooms and 
the anti -draft rioters of the slums of New York. 
But the armies were formed, in the main, on Mason 
and Dixon's line, and Destiny had given the signal 
for battle. 

Presidential elections are fraught with danger — 
among other respects in this, that they bring every 
issue to a violent head. The contest between Bu- 
chanan and Fremont was the first engagement, and 
resulted in a numerical victory, morally ominous of 
coming defeat for the South. The second and 
decisive engagement was the contest out of which 
Abraham Lincoln, who held that a house could not 

(165) 



remain divided against itself, eame as President of 
the United States. Lincoln might profess, and in 
all sincerity profess, his entire loyalty to the Consti- 
tution, and his conscientious determination to secure 
to slavery its full pound of legal flesh. But the 
South saw that the North had shaken off its yoke, 
and that the practical securities were gone. The 
Southern leaders now took their leave of Congress. 
They were allowed to dejjart, avowedly for the pur- 
pose of rebellion, hy the executive, which, had it 
been strong enough at once to arrest them all and 
hold them personally responsible for any rising 
against Federal authority in their States, might 
possibly have defeated their design. 

Then followed a scene which showed the differ- 
ence in value between the political and the moral 
opposition to slavery. Threatened now in earnest 
with the dissolution of the Union, the mere politi- 
cians fell upon their knees, and besought the South 
to forgive the rebellious conduct of the North and 
return, offering immense concessions as the price. 
They were ready to enact that slavery should never 
be abolished in the District without the consent of 
Maryland and Virginia ; to enjoin Northern States 
to repeal all their Personal-liberty acts; to have 
the case of the fugitive slave tried, not in the free 
State to which he had fled, but in the slave State to 
which he belonged; to restrain Congress and the 

( 166 ) 



Territorial legislatures from prohibiting slavery in 
a Territory; to restore the Missouri Conipromise 
line, with a national guarantee for slavery on the 
south of it; to debar any but men of Caucasian race 
from ever voting for any officer of the National 
Government. Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the heir 
of the statesman who had nobly fought for the 
right of petition, and himself afterward the admira- 
ble ambassador of the Federal Government in Eng- 
land, was so transported by devotion to the Union 
as to propose a security for slavery such as no 
Southern man had ever ventured to demand. He 
moved to enact that "no amendment of the Con- 
stitution, having for its object any interference with 
slavery, should originate with any State that did 
not recognize that relation within its own limits, or 
be valid without the assent of every one of the States 
composing the Union." This proposition was op- 
posed by only three members of a House Committee 
of thirty-three. The same committee reported in 
favor of the admission of New Mexico, then includ- 
ing Arizona, as a slave State. An amendment of 
the Constitution, which, though less stringent than 
that proposed by Mr. Adams, would yet, as Mr. 
Blaine says, have made slavery perpetual in the 
United States, as far as any influence or power of 
the National Government could affect it, actually 
passed the House of Representatives by a majority 

(167) 



of 1 33 to 05, and the Senate by a two-thirds majority, 
and was prevented from heing submitted to the 
States only by the outbreak of civil war.* Noth- 
ing, therefore, but the madness of the South pre- 
vented the absolute and irrevocable surrender of 
the North to slavery, so far as the politicians were 
concerned. Testimony of more appalling force 
could not have been given to the value of the moral 
movement of which Garrison had l)een the head. 
What were the evils of excessive enthusiasm in a 
good cause, or of undue violence of language, com- 
pared with those of the political weakness and 
disloyalty to principle which dictated this offer of 
capitulation? 

Garrison could not fail to see how complete was 
the excuse afforded by the conduct of Congress to 
onlookers in Great Britain and elsewhere for mis- 
understanding the character and object of the con- 
flict. They were justified in taking it henceforth to 
be a mere struggle for aggrandizement, with which 
they were bound to sympathize no further than 
they desired the greatness of the American Eepub- 
lic. It is to the lasting credit of the people of Great 
Britain that the mass of them did, nevertheless, 
discern that practically this was a war between 
freedom and slavery, and that they faced the cotton 
famine rather than aid slavery against freedom. 

* See Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," I., 266. 
( IfiB ) 



The South, too, might well feel thenceforth that 
the moral professions of the North were hypocrisy, 
and that the real object of the invader was conquest, 
while their own flag was that of patriotism fighting 
for national independence. Warrants for rebellion, 
when the governed were dissatisfied with the Gov- 
ernment, the Secessionists might have found in the 
writings of the whole train of American publicists 
and orators from Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln. 

The South, as we know, spurned the offer of sub- 
mission, and then ensued the greatest civil war in 
history. Which side struck the first blow is a ques • 
tion of no moral importance. It may perhaps be 
said that the North did in ordering Fort Sumter to 
be re victualled at all hazards. War was the decree 
of Fate. The North and South were two nations, 
radically opposed to each other in political character 
and requirements as in social structure. The con- 
tinuance of their Union without the abolition of 
slavery was impossible ; of the abolition of slavery 
there was practically no hope in the absence of a 
supreme and arbitrating power; the dissolution, 
therefore, was inevitable; Garrison's policy alone 
could have made it peaceful. 

In perfect consistency with his principles, Gar- 
rison welcomed the dissolution of the Union by the 
South. Separation, thenceforth, was inevitable. 
From the covenant with death and the agreement 

( i«9 ) 



with hell the North was set tree l)y the hand of God 
acting through the madness of the South. " Now, 
then," said. Garrison, "let there he a convention of 
the Free States called to organize an independent 
government on free and just principles: let the 
South take the public property on which it has laid 
piratical hands, let it take even the Capital if it will, 
and depart in peace to organize its own confederation 
of violence and tyranny." But he had scarcely 
penned the words when all thought of peaceful sepa- 
ration was swept away by the torrent of public wrath 
evoked by the firing on Fort Sumter. Yet the 
thought came back to many minds after Chancel - 
lorsville, and has perhaps been often called up again 
by the desperate difficulties of reconstruction. 

With a war merely for the Union, Garrison evi- 
dently could not have sympathized. He, however, 
clearly discerned from the beginning that whatever 
might be the ostensible object, it would be a war 
for the extirpation of sla,very. He wisely put off the 
meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, which might 
have declared against the action of the Government 
and the Reimblican part)'. The old Union, he said, 
had gone out of existence and its restoration with 
pro-slavery compromise was impossible. "The con- 
flict is really between the civilization of freedom 
and the barbarism of slavery — between the principles 
of democracy and the doctrines of absolutism — be- 

(170) 



tween the free North and the inaii-iiuln-iiting' South; 
therefore, to this extent, hopeful for the cause of 
impartial liberty. So that we cannot endorse the 
assertion, that 'this is the darkest hour for the slave 
in the history of American servitude.' No, it is 
the brightest I'' Lincoln and the Eepublicans were 
instruments in the hands of God for the achievement 
of Emancipation. 

But could a Non-Resistant sympathize with war 
at all, even for the liberation of his kind? Garrison 
practically solved that question for himself as it 
was solved by John Bright, who was also, though 
not exactly a non-resistant, an avowed enemy of all 
war. A war really against slavery had been brought 
about by other agencies than his, and certainly not 
through his fault. The world was, to use his own 
expression, not on the plane of Jesus, but on a much 
lower i)lane, and he had to look at it as it was. 
The practical question v/as whether in the conflict 
of forces, neither of them perhaps hallowed, the 
more unhallowed or the less unhallowed should pre- 
vail. Whatever the professions of the Unionist 
government might be, practically this was a war 
against slavery ; nor till it manifestly became a war 
against slavery was Garrison's sympathy declared. 
What he said himself was that when he called the 
Union "a covenant with death and an agreement 
with hell,'' he had not foreseen that Death and Hell 

(171) 



would secede. This was rather a phiyfiil evasion of 
tlie question of conscience than an answer to it. 
The answer was that when a battle was actually 
going on between good and evil, the doctrine of 
non-resistance would have been not only visionary, 
but crazy, if it had forbidden you to take the side of 
good. 

To be "on the plane of Jesus," according to the 
literal interpretation of Christ's words, had beeit 
Garrison's aspiration, and it was an aspiratioi* 
which those wiio propose to take the Gospel as their 
inspired rule of life are hardly entitled to censure 
or deride. But the world being "on a plane which 
was not that of Jesus," for Garrison, as a citizen 
and a member of society, to act in conformity with 
his individual ideal would have been to renounce all 
influence for good over the world, and almost to 
give up commerce with his kind. 

Garrison's peculiar doctrines, we may surmise, 
had been partly the offspring of circumstance. He 
had been against earthly government when the gov- 
ernment of his country was in the hands of the Slave 
power; he had been against any use of force to com- 
pel obedience to rulers when the Slave power had 
the force on its side ; he had been against the ascen- 
dancy of the churches and the clergy so long as the 
churches and the clergy were upholding or conniv- 
ing at slavery ; he had been against the authority 

( 1T2 ) 



of the Bible because the Bible was cited, with appar- 
ent justice, as authorizing a slave code; he had 
been against the Sabbath because clergymen had 
denounced the holding of abolition meetings on that 
day. The churches aiid the clergy, the Protestant 
churches and clergy at least, had now, with the 
Government and the force, come over to the side of 
right. 

The Draft, however, still brought a knotty case of 
conscience for the non-resistant. What was the duty 
of a non-resistant Abolitionist drafted as a soldier? 
To provide a substitute was morally the same thing 
as fighting yourself. But could the non-resistant 
lawfully pay the fine to a fighting government? 
The Liberator concluded that he could upon com- 
pulsion, the alternative being imprisonment or other 
penalty. Nobody who had not abstained from vot- 
ing under a Constitution which established slavery, 
the Liberator held, could claim the privilege of con- 
science as an exemption from the Draft. Exemp- 
tions on sectarian grounds he pronounced utterly 
unjust. This hit the commercial Quakers, who had 
held Abolitionism at arm's-length. 

Garrison did not at once trust or support Abra- 
ham Lincoln. There was no reason why he should. 
Lincoln, when he appeared upon the grand scene, 
must have been in Garrison's eyes a politician. He 
had entered public life through the same portal as 

(173) 



other politicians, which was that of party rather 
than of principle or truth. The moral depth and 
fervor, the tenderness and pensi\'eness, which after- 
ward, by their manifestations in a position of unique 
gravity and responsibility, distinguished Lincoln 
from all other Presidents and imblic men of the 
United States, and appealed with unrivalled force 
to the heart of the American people, were not then 
visible to any eye outside the circle of his own 
friends.* His opposition to slavery, so far as ap- 
peared, was strictly cnstitutional and conservative 
— that is, practically futile. He had never denounced 
it morally as a burning wrong with which there 
conld be no compromise. He had said that "a 
house divided against itself would not stand," and 
that ''the day must come when the Union would 
be all slave or all free:" but was not Seward the 
author of the equally memorable phrase, "irrepres- 
sible conflict," and had not Seward, in immediate 
view of the nomination to the Presidency, shown 
pretty plainly, by his softened language, that, so far 
as he was concerned, the conflict would be repressed ? 
President Lincoln set out with a pledge of his in- 
tention to secure to slavery, in full measure, all its 
constitutional rights. He may have foreseen that 
events were coming which would absolve him from 

* They are now more than ever visible to every eye in the ad- 
mirable esiray of Mr. Carl Schurz. 

(174) • 



that pledge ; but there is no reason to doubt that, 
had events taken another turn, the pledge would 
have been redeemed. Long after the commence- 
ment of the war, and when the hearts of thorough - 
going Abolitionists were almost sick with waiting 
for Emancipation, he propounded a scheme for buy- 
ing out slavery which now strikes ns as strangely 
weak in principle as well as in its details. His 
scheme even recognized the lawfulness of re-estab- 
lishing slavery by providing that, if slavery were 
anywhere re-established, the State should refund the 
money paid for comjDensation. Twice Lincoln rec- 
ommended this plan, and he would have postponed 
Emancipation till the existing slave-owners were 
dead, giving the existing slaves only the "inspirit- 
ing assurance" of freedom to be enjoyed by their 
children. To explain and justify his course, it is 
needful always to bear in mind that he was not 
master even of the North, but only the constitu- 
tional President, with limited powers, of a group of 
States in which there was still a strong party op- 
posed to the war, and in which the bulk of the peo- 
l)le had taken arms, ostensibly at least, not to put 
down slavery, but to preserve the Union, uphold 
the law, and avenge an insult to the national flag. 
Garrison, however, never offered Lincoln any per- 
verse or factious opposition. From the moment 
when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued he 



heartily supported him, and he declared in favor of 
his re-election. His course in relation to this ques- 
tion widely differed from that of Wendell Phillips, 
whose impetuous and uncompromising spirit could 
not endure or forgive the President's hesitation, 
and who, unmollified by the Emancipation Procla- 
mation, set himself fiercely against Lincoln's re- 
election. 

For Abolitionists who were not non-resistants the 
path of duty, as Garrison held, was plain. The 
Government having by the Emancipation Procla- 
mation declared itself wholly on the side of liberty, 
it could "receive the sanction and support of every 
Abolitionist, whether in a moral or military point 
of view." In fact, Garrison became a non-combat- 
ant War Eepublican with his heart very thoroughly 
in the war. 

In one military scene Garrison actually formed a 
conspicuous figure. He and Wendell Phillips were 
present when Andrew, the great war governor of 
Massachusetts, put the State and national colors 
into the hands of Colonel Shaw, the devoted com- 
mander of the first negro regiment raised for the 
service of the United States. He saw the regiment 
march, with soldierly bearing and amid enthusi- 
astic cheers, singing the "John Brown " song along 
the streets of Boston, himself standing on the very 
spot over which he had been dragged by the mob of 

(176) 



1835. When he beheld the barrier of race thus 
thrown down and the manhood of the negro so sig- 
nally recognized, he might well think that the 
hardest of all victories had been won. He might 
exultingly contrast the spectacle before his eyes 
with the treatment of Frederick Douglass when 
they were together on their lecturing tour, by the 
rowdy who collared him in the car, or by the keep- 
ers of refreshment rooms who drove him from the 
table. Unhappily, no transport of emotion could 
efface difference of color or physical repulsion : the 
heyday of enthusiasm over, nature vv^ould resume 
her sway and the difficulty of race would return. 
The recognition of the negro's equality, however, 
by his enlistment as a soldier helped to bring to a 
head for the last time the violence from which Gar- 
rison and other Abolitionists had once suffered. A 
mob rose in New York, shot negroes, hanged them 
to lamp-posts, hunted them down, maltreated them, 
threw them into the river, burned a colored orphan 
asylum to the ground and sacked the Colored Sail- 
ors' Home. The Union soldiers who were at last 
brought up to quell the rising were not non-resist- 
ants, and a thousand of the rioters paid for the out- 
rage with their lives. 

There was a scene still more historic when, the 
Union troops having entered Charleston, Garrison 

stood beside a colossal marble slab on which, as a 

(177) 



great man's sufficient epitaph, was inscribed the 
single name " Calhoun . " Amid all the medley of 
motives, political, social, or commercial, amid all 
that was confused, equivocal, and doubtful, those 
two men had clearly embodied the moral forces, the 
antagonism of which was at the bottom of the whole. 
Garrison represented the thorough-going belief that 
slavery was evil, Calhoun the thorough-going belief 
that it was good. Each faith, like all faith, was 
strong in its way. The spirit of Calhoun had fought 
desperately and long. To subdue him had cost 
lives and treasure untold; but he had succumbed 
at last, and his conqueror stood beside his grave in 
the very heart of his dominion, close to the spot 
where Abolitionist literature had been burned amid 
the acclaim of thousands, and on ground where a 
few years before no Abolitionist's life would have 
been worth an hour's purchase. Garrison's preach- 
ing could have done nothing without the strong 
hearts and arms which gave effect to it on so many 
fields. But it was largely by the moral force which 
he, more than any other man, had set in motion, that 
those hearts were fired and those arms were nerved. 
The hatred of slavery gained strength and came 
more and more to the front as the struggle went 
on. Nor does it seem likely that the mere desire 
to regain the political and commercial advantages 

of the Union would have carried the nation through 

(178) 



the reverses which marked the first years of the 
war, and which led many even of the warmest 
friends of the North on the other side of the Atlantic 
to think that the South had shown itself uncon- 
querable, and the wisest course would be to let it 
depart in peace. Certainly the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation was the moral turning-point of the w^ar. 

From Charleston, where he received an ovation 
of negro gratitude. Garrison went to visit his son 
in the neighlwring camp. There he found twelve 
hundred plantation slaves just swept by the troops 
from the interior. He called upon them to give 
three cheers for freedom. To his surprise they were 

silent : they did not know how to cheer. 

(179) 



XIII. 

The South having been subdued, and the Thir- 
teenth Amendment of the Constitution, which for- 
ever abolished slavery, having been virtually carried, 
Garrison's work was done. He had the rare good 
sense to know that his work was done, and to act 
decisively on that conviction by laying down his 
controversial pen, withdrawing his journal, resign- 
ing his leadership, and retiring into the peace of 
private life. He showed hereby the purity of his 
aim and character. If personal ambition, pride of 
leadership, the love of excitement, the craving for 
self-display enters as alloy into the motives of an 
agitator, he is pretty sure when one agitation has 
reached its goal to be hurried on to another. Ee- 
pose and silence become intolerable. Brougham 
never could have rested; no sooner was Catholic 
Emancipation passed than O'Connell took up the 
Eepeal of the Union; and Wendell Phillips, the 
king of the platform, was carried on by the impetus 
of his own eloquence and the combativeness of his 
nature from agitation to agitation till he died. 

Was the Anti-Slavery Society to be kept in exist- 



ence now that its object had been gained? Wen- 
dell Phillips vehemently contended that it should. 
Garrison pronounced in favor of its dissolution, and 
his words are a lesson to agitators : 

"My friends, let us uot any longer affect superiority when we 
are not superior — let us not assume to be better than other people 
when we are not any better. When they are reiterating all 
that we say, and disposed to do all that we wish to have done, 
what more can we ask? And yet I know the desire to keep to- 
gether, because of past memories and labors, is a very natural 
one. But let us challenge and command the respect of the na- 
tion, and of the friends of freedom throughout the world, by 
a wise and sensible conclusion. Of course, we are not to cease 
laboring in regard to whatever remains to be done, but let us 
work with the millions, and not exclusively as the American 
Anti-Slavery Society. As co-workers are everywhere found, as 
our voices are everywhere listened to with approbation and our 
sentiments cordially endorsed, let us not continvie to be isolated. 
My friend, Mr. Phillips, saj'S he has been used to isolation, and 
he thinks he can endure it some time longer. My answer is, 
that when a man stands alone with God for truth, for liberty, 
for righteousness, he may glory in his isolation ; but when the 
principle which kept him isolated has at last conquered, then to 
glory in isolation seems to me no evidence of courage or fidelity." 

The vote being taken, Garrison's resolution was 
rejected by 118 to 48, and Wendell Phillips pre- 
vailed. Garrison then retired in a modest and ami- 
able wa}', without showing the slightest mortifica- 
tion and emphatically putting aside all attempts to 
sow jealousy between Phillips and himself. Phil- 
lij)s w^as not less generous, and avowed that from 
Garrison his best inspirations had always been de- 
rived. There was afterward a passage of arms 
between them, but in this the challenger appears 

(181) 



to have been Phillips, who in his haste accused 
Garrison and other retiring members of deserting 
the cause. It seems that Garrison would have been 
willing to remain with the Society till the ratifica- 
tion of the Thirteenth Amendment was formally 
complete, had he believed that this would be the 
end; but he knew that when the last State had 
voted, the fiery spirits would be fiery still, and the 
question of dissolving the Society would have to be 
faced again. 

The Liberator was in Garrison's own hands, and 
he decided at once that, having fulfilled its mission, 
it should cease to appear. The closing scene of its 
existence maybe given in the words of his sons: 

"For the one remaining number of the Liberator, Mr. Gar- 
rison's children besought him to at once prepare his valedictory 
editorial, leaving to others the drudgery of the proof-reading 
and mechanical details of the paper. The proofs he insisted on 
reading himself, and the outside pages ho also 'made up ' from 
the galleys, but the inside pages he finally allowed his friend 
and assistant, Winchell Yerrinton, to make up under his direc- 
tion ; a considerable portion of the editorial page being given 
to letters of congratulation and farewell from old and tried 
friends. When these were inserted, less than a column's space 
was left in which to complete his valedictory, and, the number 
being already late for the press, he wrote the remainder of it 
with the printers standing at his elbow for ' copy, ' which he 
doled out to tliem a few lines at a time. The final paragraph 
lie set with his own hands, and then stepped to the imposing 
table or stone to insert it in the vacant place awaiting it. 
Evening had come, and the little group in the printing office 
gathered silently about to witness the closing act. As the form 
was locked for the last time by the senior Yerrinton, all pi'esent 
felt a sense of loss and bereavement. Mr. Garrison alone pre- 

(183) 



served liis wouted cheerfulness and serenity. From the death- 
bed of the Liberator he went directly to a committee meeting 
of the New England Freedmens Aid Society, his face toward 
the resurrection and the life of Freedom." 

"Most happy am I," said Garrison, "to be no 
longer in conflict with the mass of my fellow-coun- 
trymen on the su])ject of slavery. For no man of 
any refinement or sensibility can be indifferent to 
the approbation of his fellow-men, if it be rightly 
earned." His action showed that, in so saying, he 
spoke from his heart. 

The last number of the Liberator contained the 
valedictory, but the preceding number had con- 
tained the p?ean, which may be taken as sincere, 
and assuredly was not penned by an infidel : 

"Rejoice, and give praise and glory to God, ye who have so 
long and so untiringly participated in all the trials and vicissi- 
tudes of that mighty conflict ! Having sown in tears, now reap 
in joy. Hail, redeemed, regenerated America! Hail, North 
and South, East and West ! Hail, the cause of Peace, of Lib- 
erty, of Righteousness, thus mightily strengthened and signally 
glorified ! Hail, the Present, with its transcendent claims, its 
new duties, its imperative obligations, its sublime opportuni- 
ties ! Hail, the Future, with its pregnant hopes, its glorious 
promises, its illimitable powers of expansion and develop- 
ment ! Hail, ye ransomed millions, no more to be chained, 
scourged, mutilated, bought and sold in the market, robbed of 
all rights, hunted as partridges upon the mountains in your 
flight to obtain deliverance from the house of bondage, branded 
and scorned as a connecting link between the liuman race and 
the brute creation ! Hail, all nations, tribes, kindreds, and 
peoples, 'made of one blood,' interested in a common redemp- 
tion, heirs of the same immortal destinj' ! Hail, angels in glory 
and spirits of* the just made perfect, and tune your harps anew, 
singing, 'Great and marvellous are Thy works. Lord God, Al- 

(183) 



mighty , just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of Saints ! Who 
sliall not fear Tliee, O Lord, and glorify Thy name? for Tliou 
only art holy : for all nations shall come and worship before 
Thee • for Thy judgments are made manifest. ' " 

He might retire and repose, but of course he could 
not be idle. He became a regular contributor to 
the Independent, and wrote in support of reforms 
which he had already espoused, notably of Prohibi- 
tion, or, as its advocates called it. Temperance, the 
first cause to which he had dedicated his pen. As 
a sworn enemy of race-distinction and caste, he laid 
his familiar lance in rest against the politicians who, 
in contempt of treaties, were advocating the exclu- 
sion of the Chinese ; nor had he much difficulty in 
unhorsing opponents whose arguments, whether 
social, industrial, or religious, were mere subterfuge, 
their real motive being their desire to capture the 
Irish and German vote. On one subject which he 
treated, his views had undergone a notable change. 
Early in life he had been taken, as we have seen, 
with protection to native industry. But in his 
great struggle for the freedom of the slave he had 
learned to embrace freedom of every kind, and to 
trust its beneficence without reserve. He saw, what 
the workingmen of his country are at last beginning 
to see, that fetters imposed on trade are fetters im- 
posed on industry. He had also had great experi- 
ence in combating the sophistries of self-interest, 
and had learned to know them when he saw them, 

(184) 



however artfully disguised. '"The protection of 
American labor' has a taking sound; but it really 
means the restriction and taxation of that labor. 
Protection against what? Have we not the best- 
educated and most intelligent population on earth? 
And does not this imply industry, thrift, skill, en- 
terprise, invention, capital, beyond any other forty 
millions of people? Have we not muscles as well as 
brains? Have we not a country unrivalled in the 
variety and abundance of its natural productions, 
and the abounding riches of its mineral resources? 
What more need we to claim, or ought we to have? 
If in an open field we cannot successfully compete 
with 'the cheap and pauperized labor of Europe,' 
in all that is necessary to our comfort, or even to 
our luxury, then let us go to the wall ! Was the 
slave labor of the South at all a match for the free 
labor of the North? In which section of the Union 
was industry best protected or wealth most aug- 
mented? Is it not ludicrous to read what piteous 
calls are made for the protection of the strong 
against the weak, of the intelligent against the 
ignorant, of the well-fed against the half -starving, 
of our free republican nation against the effete gov- 
ernments of the Old World, in all that relates to 
the welfare of the people? With all that God has 
done for us in giving us such a goodly heritage, can- 
not we contrive to live and flourish without erecting 

( 11^0 ) 



barriers against the freest intercourse with all na- 
tions? Must we guard our ports against the free 
importation of hemp, iron, broadcloth, silk, coal, 
etc., as though it were a question of quarantine for 
the small-pox or the Asiatic cholera? Eef using to 
do so, will the natural consequences be 'vacant 
factories, furnaces standing idle, the shops of man- 
ufacturing industry closed, labor begging and starv- 
ing for the want of employment, ' and all the other 
fearful results that are so confidently predicted by 
the advocates of the protective policy, falsely so 
called? Similar predictions were made by the 
defenders of Southern slavery in regard to the abo- 
lition of that nefarious system, and in order to 
subject to popular odium those who demanded the 
immediate and unconditional emancipation of the 
oppressed. Freedom, as well as Wisdom, is justified 
of her children ; and in proportion as she bears sway 
will it go well with any people." 

We are surprised, on the other hand, to find com- 
paratively little on record as to his opinions on the 
great question of Eeconstruction, or as to the prac- 
tical results, political and social, of Emancipation. 
In his reply to F. W. Newman, who had condemned 
Lincoln for not enfranchising the negroes of Loui- 
siana, there is a passage which has a conservative 
ring. " By what political precedent or administra- 
tive policy in any country," he asks, "could he [the 

(186) 



President] have been justified if he had attempted 
to do this? When was it ever known that Kher- 
ation from bondage was accompanied by a recog- 
nition of political equalit}'? Chattels personal may 
be instantly translated from the auction -block into 
freemen; but when were they ever taken at the 
same time to the ballot-box and invested with all 
jDolitical rights and immunities? According to the 
laws of development and progress it is not practi- 
cable. To denounce or complain of President Lin- 
coln for not disregarding public sentiment and not 
flying in the face of these laws is hardly just. Be- 
sides, I doubt whether he has the constitutional 
right to decide this matter. Ever since this 
Government was organized, the right of suffrage 
has been determined by each State in the Union 
for itself, so that there is no uniformity in regard 
to it. In some free States colored citizens are al- 
lowed to vote, in others they are not. It is always 
a State, never a national, matter. In honestly seek- 
ing to j)reserve the Union, it is not for President 
Lincoln to seek, by a special edict applied to a par- 
ticular State or locality, to do violence to a universal 
rule, accepted and acted upon from the beginning 
till now by the States in their individual sovereignty. 
Under the war power, he had the constitutional 
right to emancipate the slaves in every rebel State, 
and also to insist that, in any plan of reconstruction 

(187) 



that might be agreed upon, slavery should be ad- 
mitted to be dead, beyond jiower of resurrection. 
That being accomplished, I question whether he 
could safely or advantageously — to say the least — 
enforce a rule, ah initio, touching the ballot which 
abolishes complexional distinctions ; any more than 
he could safely or advantageously decree that all 
women (whose title is equally good) should enjoy the 
electoral right and help to form the State. Nor, if 
the freed blacks were admitted to the polls by Pres- 
idential fiat, do I see any permanent advantage 
likely to be secured by it ; for, submitted to as a 
necessity at the outset, as soon as the State was 
organized and left to manage its own affairs, the 
white population, with their superior intelligence, 
wealth and power, would unquestionably after the 
franchise in accordance with their prejudices, and 
exclude those thus summarily brought to the polls. 
Coercion would gain nothing. In other words — as in 
your own country — universal suffrage will be hard 
to win and to hold without a general preparation 
of feeling and sentiment. But it will come, both 
at the South and with you ; yet only by a struggle 
on the part of the disfranchised, and a growing 
conviction of its justice, ' in the good time coming. ' 
With the abolition of slavery in the South, preju- 
dice, or 'colorphobia, ' the natural product of the 
system, will gradually disappear — as in the case of 

(188) 



your West India coloiries — and black men will win 
their way to wealth, distinction, eminence, and offi- 
cial station. I ask only a charitable judgment for 
President Lincoln respecting this matter, whether 
in Louisiana or any other State." 

Garrison, however, favored the bestowal of the 
suffrage by Federal enactment on the negro. He 
also favored the impeachment of President John- 
son — a measure of violence justified, as fair-minded 
Eepublicans like Fessenden saw, by no criminal acts 
on the part of the President, but adopted as a des- 
perate mode of bringing the policy of the executive 
again into harmony with that of the legislature, 
which, under the British Constitution, would have 
been done by a vote of want of confidence, followed 
by a change of ministry, but for which, under the 
American Constitution, no provision had been made. 
Garrison, it seems, would also have maintained the 
ascendancy of the carpet-bagging governments by 
prolonging the military occupation of the South. 
For this, Kuklux outrage had given him at least a 
tenable ground. Later on, though he took no act- 
ive part in politics, his heart seems to have been 
with that party of uncompromising Emancipationists 
whose policy was nicknamed by moderates that of 
"shaking the Bloody Shirt." He insisted on the 
adoption of every possible measure for levelling the 
barrier of race, and protested against the omission 

( 18i) ) 



from the Civil Rights bill of participation in the 
common schools. He deprecated the erection by 
colored people of a church for their own race, and 
pointed to Berea College, in Kentucky, where the 
races were educated together, as showing the true 
way to the pacification and happiness of the South. 
But he lived fifteen years after Emancipation. Did 
he carefully observe its results? Did he make a 
calm study of the situation? Did he watch the 
progress of the negroes in the South and compare it 
with their progress in Hayti or Liberia, where they 
were not under the political tutelage of the white 
race? Above all, did events appear to him to show 
that there was any hojDe of the fusion of the races? 
Without intermarriage there can hardly be social 
equality ; without social equality there can hardly 
be real political equality or a genuine commonwealth, 
let the franchise be distributed as it may. The 
Eoman Commons were in the right when, having 
wrested from the politicians a share of all political 
franchises and offices, they still refused to rest con- 
tent without the concession of intermarriage. But 
the Patricians and Plebeians were, if not of the 
same, of kindi'ed races ; there was at any rate no 
barrier of color or of physical antipathy between 
them. The same may be said of other cases in 
which Emancipation has been a complete success, 
as in that of the enfranchisement of the mediaeval 

(190) 



serfs. But fusion between the races in the South- 
ern States has, since Emancipation, become more 
impossible than ever. The hnk, evil as it was in 
its source, of half-caste population, by which they 
were formerly connected, cannot fail to dwindle 
when the black woman is no longer at the mercy 
of the white overseer. The social feeling of the 
superior against the inferior race is not likely to be 
softened but rather intensified when the inferior 
race has pretensions to equality. In the West In- 
dies there has been no fusion of races. In Jamaica 
there was political discord, which at last broke out 
into murderous conflict, when the Imperial Govern- 
ment, by which Emancipation had been ordained, 
threw down its warder between the combatants and 
restored peace by suspending the Constitution. In 
the Southern States there is no controlling and 
arbitrating power but Congress, which is not, like 
the British Government, impartial, the Southern 
whites having a strong representation in it and 
almost a veto on its action, while the action on the 
other side is swayed by desire of the negro vote. 
The practical solution for the present seems to be 
the political domination of the white race and the 
exclusion, in the mass, of the black race from the 
ballot. Personal liberty the black has gained, and 
personal security, except that he is still too often 
lynched by white lawlessness instead of being, like 

(191) 



the whites, tried by jury. Industrial freedom he 
also enjoys, and, thanks to his possession of it, his 
material condition has already been improved. This 
would not have satisfied Garrison, who demanded 
for the negro nothing less than full American citi- 
zenship. But, once more, he had never looked fairly 
in the face the terrible problem of race, of which 
personal and industrial liberty without the power 
of exercising the franchise is at least a provisional 
solution. What the ultimate solution will be, and 
whether it will certainly be brought about without 
social war, is a question which the best heads in the 

United States appear at present unable to answer. 

(192) 



XIV. 

"I BEGAN the publication of the Liberator with- 
out a subscriber, and I end it — it gives me unal- 
loyed satisfaction to say — without a farthing as the 
pecuniary result of the patronage extended to it 
during thirty-five years of unremitted labors." 
These were Garrison's words when he brought his 
editorship to a close. The contrast is curious be- 
tween the barrenness of Abolitionist journalism and 
the immensely profitable circulation of the Aboli- 
tionist novel. There can be no doubt that with 
Garrison's vigor and readiness in writing as an 
ordinary journalist he would have made a good in- 
come. It would have been rank ingratitude to 
allow a great servant of the country and of human- 
ity to close his days in penury. The sum of thirty- 
one thousand dollars was raised for him by subscrip- 
tion, and if he had hesitated to accept it he would 
have done a wrong to his fellow -citizens. 

In 18G7 Garrison went to rejoice with his friends 

in England over the triumph of their common cause. 

He met with an enthusiastic reception in all parts 

(193) 



of the country. In his mmd, at all events, the 
baseless belief that the English i3eople were on the 
side of slavery can never have found place. The 
attendance at a comiDlimentary breakfast given him 
in London presents a long list of famous names, 
and among them that of Lord Eussell, who had 
come expressly to recall any unjust things which, 
misled by the offers of compromise with slavery 
made in Congress on the approach of the war, he 
might have said of Lincoln and the American 
Government. Mill pronounced the eulogy of phi- 
losophy on the reformer who had been derided as 
an incendiary and a fanatic. 

But the principal part on the occasion was justly 
assigned to Bright, who throughout the conflict had 
upheld with his noblest eloquence the cause of the 
North, though to his memory, when he died, the 
Senate of the LTnited States refused to pay a tribute, 
because, having been the firm friend of their Union, 
he had been loyal also to his own. George Thomp- 
son was there with his son-in-law, F. W. Chesson, 
a man who by the steadfast, unselfish and modest 
devotion of a life to the championship of weak and 
oppressed i-aces, earned though he did not wear a 
crown. His name, by most readers hardly noticed 
among those of the illustrious company at the Gar- 
rison breakfast, shines conspicuous in the eyes of all 

(194) 



who had watched his hfe-loiig labors and knew his 
worth. 

It was one of the proofs of Garrison's freedom 
from personal ambition and the irritability which it 
is apt to engender, that he carried through all his 
controversies and through the life-long storm of ob- 
loquy and abuse a temper in private perfectly un- 
soured, warm affections, and the fullest capacity 
for domestic enjoyment. His wife, who had gone 
through the tempests at his side, and to whom he 
was tenderly attached, after being long a sufferer 
from ill-health, died three years before him. But 
his sons remained to him. There remained to him, 
also, many of his old fellow -crusaders and friends. 
Isaac Knajip, his partner in the Liberator, had, in 
the midst of the first agitation, fallen, sad to relate, 
into evil habits, and, in spite of Garrison's generous 
efforts to redeem him, had come to a bad end. 
Lundy had also departed early, and before his death 
there had been a coolness on his side, caused by 
divergence of policy, which, however, had not pre- 
vented his former coadjutor from rendering full 
justice to his memory. Wendell Phillips had drifted 
away on the tide of battles in which Garrison had 
no part. But Oliver Johnson and S. May, Jr., were 
still at their leader's side. Garrison's old age was 
the serene evening of a stormy yet happy day. It 

( 19.-) ) 



was so serene that he could find amusement, we are 

told, in whist, but had too much openness of nature 

to conceal his hand. He died in New York City 

in his seventy- fourth year, May 2-i, 1870, and was 

buried in Boston, where the best years of his life 

had been spent. 

(19fr) 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction 3 

Section I. — The Garrison family — Garrison's boyhood — His 
apprentice years as a printer — Early essays as a writer — 
Connection with the Newburj'port He/aM — Visits Boston — 
Connection with the National Philanthropist there 7 

Section II. — Garrison forms the acquaintance of the Aboli- 
tionist advocate, Benjamin Lundy — Edits the Journal of 
the Times at Bennington, Vt. — Petitions Congress to abol- 
ish slavery in District of Columbia — Fined for non-service 
in militia — Delivers a Fourth of July address in Boston, 
on the national sin of slavery — Personal appearance and 
dress 19 

Section III. — Forms partnership with Lundy and becomes 
associate editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation — 
Sees iniquities of the slave traffic at Baltimore — Advocates 
immediate emancipation — Encounter with slave-trader — 
Denounces owner of a slave ship — Sued for libel, is con- 
victed and imprisoned — Life in prison — Discussion with a 
slaveholder — Writes abolition poetry — Arthur Tappan, the 
philanthropist, pays Garrison's fine — Garrison begins to 
lecture for the anti -slavery cause — Churches are closed 
against him — Makes a disciple of Samuel J. May — Isaac 
Knapp joins Garrison in setting up another anti -slavery 
journal 30 

(Section IV. — Founding of the Liberator at Boston — Motto 
of the new journal — Garrison launched on his life's work 
— Early hardships and ceaseless opposition— Slavery every- 
where dominant — National morality dumb 40 

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Section V. — Ancient slavery— Condition of the slave at 
Athens and Rome — No insurmountable barrier of race — 
Friendship and sometimes moral equality between the slave 
and a good master — Slavery in America contrasted — Effect 
on the character of the slaveholder, a trampler on human- 
ity — Society in the Cotton States — Representatives of the 
Slave States in Congress — Their political strength and as- 
sumption of social superiority — Rising of slaves at South- 
ampton, Virginia — Terrible outpouring of white vengeance 
— The Negro at the North a pariah — Caste and the bar of 
color 47 

Section VI. — Garrison's Abolition platform in the Z,i6(?ra^or 
— Severity of his denunciations of slavery — Compensation 
to the slave-owner scouted by the Liberator — Wrongfulness 
of emancipation without it — Abolition of slavery in the 
"West Indies — The realm of slavery disturbed by the Lib- 
erator — The journal boycotted and its editor threatened 
— Nat Turner's rising — Chief Justice Taney's judgment — 
Race exclusiveness at the North — Garrison at war with 
caste feeling — Insoluble problem of the races — Prudence 
Crandall opens a school for colored children — She is per- 
secuted and the school broken up — Organization of the 
New England Anti- Slavery Society — Preamble of its con- 
stitution and objects aimed at 57 

Section VI. A. — Garrison's antagonism to the Coloniza- 
tion Society — Why he assailed its doctrines and purposes 
— Visits England as the representative of American Abo- 
litionism — Heartiness of his welcome — Buxton's mistake 
— Great meeting at Exeter Hall — O'Connell's invective 
against slavery — Garrison returns to America — Accused of 
having traduced his country in England — Incendiary vio- 
lence of the pro-slavery press — The Liberator's reply to his 
calumniators — Garrison's marriage — The American Anti- 
Slavery Society founded at Philadelphia — Garrison drafts 
the Declaration of Sentiments — Object of the Convention 
and the movement which it embodied, " to bring the whole 
nation to speedy repentance" 73 

Section VII. — A British anti-slavery lecturer visits America 
— Violent outcry against the "foreign emissary" — A public 

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PAGE 

meeting at Boston denounces Thompson — Garrison criti- 
cises the speeches and speakers at the meeting — Inflamed 
state of the public mind — Garrison falls into the hands of 
the mob — Rescued by the Mayor of Boston, he spends the 
night in prison — Thompson escapes and returns to England 
— The Abolitionists suffer martjaxlom for the cause 89 

Section VIII. — Garrison devotes himself moi-e assiduously 
to lecturing — His mental gifts as an orator — Growth of the 
Abolition movement — Its effect on the politicians — The 
Liberator opposed to the movement becoming political — 
J. G. Birney organizes the Liberty Party and becomes its 
candidate for the Presidency — The Churches in relation to 
the anti-slavery crusade — The Bible and American slavery 97 

Section IX. — Garrison breaks with the Churches— Bids fare- 
well to orthodox Christianity — Embraces Woman's Rights 
and asserts the political equality of the sexes — Comes un- 
der the influence of J. Humphrey Noyes — Is attracted ty 
Perfectionism and espouses the doctrine of Non-resistance 
— Imports both into the columns of the Liberator — Dismay 
of his friends — Condemns Lovejoy for defending himself 
against his assassins — Abolitionism fears being compro- 
mised by Garrison's heresies — Defection of some of his 
friends — The schism affects the Liberator, and displaj's 
itself in the two chief anti- slavery societies — The leader- 
ship in dispute — Garrison confirmed in the leadership. . . . 109 

Section X. — Garrison attends the World's Convention in 
London — English prejudice against women delegates — 
Success of the Convention — Gratifying reception in Eng- 
land — Redmond, the negro delegate — Turn of the tide in 
America — Abolitionism gathers strength — Garrison's po- 
etic effusions — Discussion of the Sabbath question — The 
Liberator exonerates himself from the charge of infidelity 126 

Section XI. — "Moral Plouglishares" — Attacks on the clergy 
— Temperance and other moral movements — Ireland's ap- 
peal against slaverj' in the United States — Defection of the 
Irish in America — Kossuth and Father Mathew disappoint 
the Abolitionists in their attitude toward slavery — Fur- 
ther visit to Britain — Disruption in the Scottish Church 
— Garrison deprecates the Free Church of Scotland taking 

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PACE 

money from the Southern Pi-esbyterians — He declares for 
the dissolution of the Union — Slavery and the Constitution 
— "The irrepressible conflict" — Union with slaveholders 
characterized as a " covenant with death and an agreement 
with hell" — The Liberator's No-Government theory brealis 
down — Accompanied by Fred Douglass, Garrison carries 
the torch of conscience into the West — Further experience 
of the existence of caste feeling — Garrison presides at an 
annual meeting of the Anti -Slavery Society at New York — 
The Rynders' incident — Efl'ects of the new Fugitive Slave 
Law — English testimonial to the Libei'ator — "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin" — The combat deepens — Massachusetts on the side of 
freedom — The Framingham demonstration 134 

Section XII. — The approach of civil war — John Brown's raid 
on Virginia — The political parties divide on Mason and 
Dixon's Line — Lincoln appears on the scene — The Southern 
leaders take leave of Congress — Rebellion — The politicians 
truckle to the Slave South — HoUowness of the moral pro- 
fessions of the North — Garrison's attitude in relation to 
the war — Non-resistance and the draft — Lincoln and the 
Emancipation Proclamation — Colored regiments in the 
war — The draft riots at New York — Calhoun versus the 
Liberator — The moral turning- j)oint of the war 163 

Section XIII. — The Union preserved and slavery doomed — 
The Thirteenth Amendment — Close of the Liberator's work 
— Wendell Phillips' motion to maintain the Anti-Slavery 
Society prevails — Garrison withdraws from the Society 
and discontinues the Liberator — His valedictory — Again 
champions Temperance and espouses Free Trade — Compar- 
ative silence on the question of Reconstruction 180 

Section XIV. — Public testimonial to the Liberator — Final 
visit to England — Complimentary breakfast in London — 

Personal traits ; closing years ; death 193 

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